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Nearly 9,300 Early Ballots Cast at Watauga County Admin Site Re-Processed on Sunday

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Watauga County Board of Elections Chair Bill Aceto, Watauga County Elections Director Matt Snyder, and former Democrat board member Kathleen Campbell were among those present for the re-processing of ballots. Photos by Ken Ketchie

By Jesse Wood

After a voting machine malfunctioned in one of the six early voting sites in Watauga County, the Watauga County Board of Elections conducted a re-processing of more than 9,000 ballots on Sunday afternoon.

“It went great just as we had hoped,” Watauga County Elections Director Matt Snyder said on Monday. “We ended up with the same number of ballot counts.”

The exact total of ballots re-processed was 9,291.

According to one of the incident reports filed to the State Board of Elections, the bar scanner on the voting machine inside the Watauga County Administration building was the source of the problem. Smudged with ink, the bar scanner wasn’t reading properly, according to one of the reports.

Snyder said that once the problem became apparent, he contacted members of the Watauga County Board of Elections, the State Board of Elections and Printelect, supplier of elections products and services. The decision was then made to just go ahead and re-process all of the ballots.

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