MORGANTOWN — A total of 92 additional ballots were added to last week’s Election Day totals on Monday as the Monongalia County Clerk’s office wrapped up the canvassing process just after noon at the county’s election headquarters in the Mountaineer Mall.
The Monongalia County Commission, sitting as the board of canvassers, looked over 145 provisional ballots. A provisional ballot is cast but not counted until a determination is made on its validity.
Of that number, 55 ballots were counted and 90 were not, primarily for reasons like the voter not being registered in Monongalia County.
An additional 37 absentee ballots received after Election Day were also counted.
County Clerk Carye Blaney said the low number of provisional ballots is testament to the job done by the county’s 165 poll workers in light of thousands of voters having a different polling location this year due to the redistricting process.
“We didn’t have that big of a problem, but that was the biggest question we had on Election Day from our voters. Maybe they didn’t vote in the primary so they were not aware of the precinct or location changes and so they went to their old precinct. But if that happened they were given the proper instruction by our poll workers,” Blaney said. “Our poll workers did a fantastic job on Election Day getting voters to their correct locations.”
The provisional and late-arriving absentee ballots didn’t change the outcome of any races but it did make a very close race between Republican Mike Oliverio and Democrat Barbara Evans Fleischauer in the state Senate 13th District just a little tighter.
The district covers portions of Monongalia and Marion counties along the I-68 and I-79 corridor.
Oliverio held a 162-vote edge on Election Day (13,459 to 13,297). After canvassing in Monongalia and Marion counties, the official gap ended up being 153 votes — 13,495 to 13,342.
All told, 26,834 or 43.42% of Monongalia County’s 61,806 registered voters cast a ballot in the midterm election. That included 15,131 on Election Day, 10,992 during early voting and 619 absentee.
Those numbers are down across the board from the 2018 midterm, when 31,660 of the county’s 68,863 registered voters (45.98%) got to the polls. Nearly 14,000 people took advantage of early voting in 2018.
“I think we led the state in the number of people who came out for early voting, but it was still a lot less than what we voted early in 2018,” Blaney said. “We’ll continue to try to do more advertising and marketing about the election and try to increase our turnout numbers for our voters.”
What will likely be more difficult to increase will be the efficiency with which Blaney and company run an election. The clerk’s office once again had the county’s unofficial results posted online about an hour after polls closed on Election Day.
How?
“Organization and management,” Blaney said. “We’re well prepared and we’re ready to go. We work for months preparing for an election and getting ourselves organized. Our goal is to make ourselves more efficient each election. We really try to do that. And I can’t say enough about the staff. They’re the best in the state in my opinion at running elections and that’s evident by how well we’re able to get things done.”
