Nearly 10,000 votes added to Christian County’s certified vote total, impacting sports gambling vote

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) - Missouri’s Amendment 2 sports gambling vote got more interesting.

The Christian County clerk added 9,800 votes to the county’s certified total submitted to the Missouri Secretary of State’s office. Clerk Paula Brumfield says those were absentee, mail-in, and provisional ballots.

In the late hours of election night, the clerk postponed the count of those ballots until Wednesday morning. According to the clerk, her team did not count them on election day because the machines would have erased all of the ballot data if they had been shut down. Brumfield said the decision was made with the agreement of the Republican and Democratic party representatives in the office.

For the November election, Christian County has 68,453 registered voters.

“We were at 75 percent even. 75.00 percent for this election,” says Brumfield.

That is 51,342 who voted.

“We knew we would be busy, but we just had high volumes coming through the doors,” says Brumfield.

In the late hours of November election day, the clerk decided to postpone counting the ballots of three machines in the clerk’s office until the next morning. According to the clerk, the ballots were not in on the day of the count because the machines would have erased all of the ballot data if they had been shut down.

“We did not report those results because we didn’t expect a high turnout in the office, and we were running out of machines,” says Brumfield.

Those ballots were part of the total from the day of early voting, mail-in ballots, military, and provisional ballots. The clerk says that the decision was made with the agreement of the Republican and Democrat party representatives at the county clerk’s office that night.

“We just did not have another machine to feed those provisional and those military in, so we had to keep those machines open to be able to feed them to be counted,” says Brumfield.

When those numbers were finalized, the vote margin for Amendment 2 was around 400 total votes. By Friday morning, that difference was back up to 747 votes, a margin of 0.02%

“We’re glad we got this done on election day. We are obviously going to wait until every last vote is counted, but these votes that are coming in late are almost universally breaking towards us,” says Jack Cardetti with Winning for Missouri Education.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft says that there are checks and balances with elections.

“Unfortunately, this is an election year, where people are going to understand why we double-check and triple-check. And frankly, why isn’t it just the local election authority that goes back over the numbers, but why does the Secretary of State go back over it to make sure things were done correctly?” says Jay Ashcroft, the Secretary of State for Missouri.

Secretary Ashcroft would have liked to see Christian County give those results on election night.

“Those numbers could have been reported on election night. They should have been reported on election night,” says Ashcroft.

Brumfield says the decision was made to help protect ballot and voter information.

“It was just our decision to keep those three machines up, feed in our military and our provisional ballots in it, and report everything when we did our final certification and when our certification team came in and certified everything,” says Brumfield.

Ashcroft says the decision shouldn’t have happened.

“Here is the most important thing: the process caught it. The process as a whole worked,” says Ashcroft.

While there will be questions about the process in Christian County, “I understand, and I knew I would get, people would be upset, and people would not like the choice I made, but that’s the choice I had to make,” says Brumfield.

The final Missouri county results will be certified and sent to the secretary of state’s office on Tuesday.

Brumfield understands people’s feelings about the decision but says they didn’t have enough machines to complete the count that night. She also understands that the new vote count may impact a sports gambling recount.

The Christian County Clerk says that the results for no local races in Christian County were flipped or overturned because of the new total.

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