ST. LOUIS — After a day and a half of recounting ballots, officials at the St. Louis Board of Elections Commissioners confirmed incumbent Sheriff Vernon Betts was defeated by his former employee and challenger Alfred Montgomery in the August Democratic primary contest.
The recount showed Montgomery with a 221-vote margin of victory, which was 35 votes closer than the initial election day results. Officials counted 22,802 votes (50.24%) for him over 22,581 votes (49.76%) for Betts.
Montgomery, 27, stood outside of a window pane and watched election officials feed ballots into scanners for hours on Tuesday and Wednesday in a rigorous, court-ordered process he compared to "watching paint dry."
"The people of the city of St. Louis have spoken again," Montgomery said. "It looks like this is another victory. I will be the next sheriff of the city of St. Louis."
The confirmation of his victory didn't come without some frustrating moments.
After officials scanned paper ballots into scanners on the first floor of the downtown election headquarters, they carried the results upstairs on a USB flash drive to enter into a separate computer system where it would spit out the results.
A handful of staff printed out several sheets of paper before they began discussing the results and placed a call to Hart InterCivic, the manufacturer of the ballot scanner devices, to seek clarification on what had occurred.
Apparently, during the recount, the scanner could not accurately read 81 ballots due to some sort of physical or digital obstruction either on the screen or in the image captured on the machine.
If a scanner were to encounter a similar error on Election Day, the device would reject the ballot and ask the voter to clarify their intent. Because of the time-sensitive nature of the recount, election officials decided to override that feature during the retabulation to expedite the process. The result left them with 81 ballots where the voters' intent was not immediately clear, so those ballots were not included in the total.
"We had to go back to the manufacturer of the equipment, and I think they're actually looking at it themselves," Election Commissioner Gary Stoff (R) said. "But in the interest of giving the final result of the retabulation and talking to the members of the media, we wanted to be able to report what we had. And that's not going to change."
5 On Your Side placed calls and wrote emails to Austin, Texas-based Hart InterCivic seeking comment but they were not immediately returned.
"We were on the phone with one of their IT people," Stoff said immediately after reporting the results. "We don't have an explanation for this right now."
About an hour later, Stoff's Democratic counterpart Ben Borgmeyer sent a copy of one of the 81 "spoiled" ballots showing how the scanner appeared to capture a vertical black line running through the entire page. When those lines crossed through both names for Montgomery and Betts, the computer would refuse to count the ballot, resulting in the undercount.
Retabulation results also appeared to indicate an additional 106 absentee ballots, but election officials believe one of the boxes of in-person ballots may have been accidentally scanned through and incorrectly counted as absentee ballots.
The total number of ballots cast on election day (49,663) was only five off from the 49,658 ballots counted during the rerun.
"With a 50-vote difference, we need to come out with a better vote counting system at the Board of Elections," Montgomery said. "I know it was a recount, and we expect there to be some difference in a recount, but at the end of the day, we won this race and I look forward to transitioning to the Sheriff's office."
Betts has not responded to the new result, but his lawyers could still demand a hand recount.
According to Stoff, the Republican Commissioner who has worked at the city elections board for nearly a quarter century, this was only the second citywide recount in recent history. The last one came in a race for a committeeman post.
"I can't predict, but my guess would be this would be satisfactory to the court, and probably to the sheriff as well," Stoff said.
