BROOKINGS (11-6-26) — Both the Brookings County Commission and Brookings City Council voted yesterday (November 5) to approve canvassing of the city-county results from Tuesday’s election.
County Finance Technician Kim Larson said turnout was roughly fifty percent… “There were 11,661 ballots cast. For the city portion, there are 14,110 active voters, … 7021 ballots cast for that city portion, which gives the city a 49.76 percent turnout. The county’s turnout was 52.75 (percent).”
She said up next will be a post-election audit at the City-County Government Center on November 18… “We have to draw five percent of our precincts — so for us that’s one location that gets audited — and then it’s a minimum of 100 ballots. … We draw two races within that location then to audit as well — one has to be statewide if possible, and then the second race that we audit can be any race that was on the ballot.”
Interim County Finance Officer Jennifer Beller said the count was briefly delayed Tuesday night… “While counting them, there was jam — which happens quite often — but as it jams, we take all the ballots out and you have to clear it off the screen. Well unfortunately one of the times that it did that, it didn’t get cleared off the screen; and so once we noticed that the count was off — it basically counted that batch twice — so once we noticed that that was off, we reset, we brought the whole machine back down to zero, and just started counted those absentees over. And so that’s why it delayed that absentee count a little bit. There was no issues with the machines. It was just an error of clearing out that one batch.”
The counting finished shortly after midnight.
The official statewide vote canvas will take place November 10.
— Brookings Radio News
