Marion County Clerk Steve Fox had some special surprises for his final election before retiring December first. It started with power problems.
“Three precincts that had power outages for multiple hours during the day. I really want to thank the community for stepping up. We had generators, lights, and different things brought in so that we could get through the day, and I appreciate that.”
The longest outage was in Romine Township where the power was out four and a half hours. The battery backup on the voting machine eventually went out after three and a half hours and paper ballots had to be used. The voting eventually had to be moved to the foyer as darkness was setting in. A voter later brought in portable lights. The other electrical outages impacted the Alma and Kinmundy polling places. Generators were donated there to keep the voting going.
The next problem came as vote counting was about done, when four precincts had issues.
“We end up having to retabulate, recalculate those to make sure everything matched up,” Fox said. “We got that taken care of. It took us about two and a half hours to do that.”
That meant final unofficial vote totals weren’t available until about midnight.
Fox is reminding everyone the numbers are not final.
“Election results are unofficial right now. We’ve got a fourteen-day window that a vote-by-mail ballot that was postmarked by election day can still be returned, and any provisional ballots voted in the polling places still have to be reviewed.”
Voter turnout was right where Fox thought it would be. About 55 percent of registered voters went to the poles.
In the statewide races, around 70-percent of the votes cast in Marion County were for the Republican candidate. County voters also strongly supported Congressman Mike Bost in his re-election bid over Democrat Julie Fortier 9,665 votes to 3,294.
