Recount shows ballot counts accurate

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SANDPOINT — After a full day of counting, Bonner County had a nine-vote difference between the ballots counted on Election Night and those tabulated during Saturday’s partial recount.

The ballots were "super faintly marked [former President Donald] Trump ballots that our scanners didn't pick up but were adjudicated as votes after much debate," Bonner County Clerk Michael Rosedale said.

A ninth ballot, also faintly marked, was added to Democrat Joe Biden's total in the county.

Bonner County Clerk Michael Rosedale said marks on the nine ballots were very faint and not caught by the county's scanners and not counted as votes. The error rate was 0.116%.

"Other than that, everything was pretty dead on," Rosedale said.

Rosedale complimented the volunteers who gave up their Saturday to help in the partial recount and said everyone had a great attitude and took pains to be as exact as they could.

"I think what this shows is that people can trust that what they voted is how it's going to be counted," he said.

In total, eight precincts were included in the partial recount to get to about 7,900 votes out of the roughly 27,000 cast by Bonner County voters on Election Day. That statistical sample allows the Secretary of State's office to extrapolate the numbers to see if the margin of error is plus or minus 0.2 percent

"Now we're looking for less than 1% error, something that's most likely attributable to human error," Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck said as he oversaw the recount at the Bonner County Administration building on Saturday.

In counties where a full recount was done — Butte and Camas counties — both tabulated ballots by hand with no electronic counting. One county saw a difference of .14% difference and the other had a .63 difference. Both fall within the statistical rate for human error, Houck said.

Care was taken from the moment the partial recount began to ensure a chain of custody, from taking a photo of the secured door where the ballots were stored as it was unlocked to the ballots remaining under the watch of Houck or Rosedale the entire day.

To pick the precincts to be included in the partial recount, precinct numbers were placed on a similarly sized piece of paper and placed into a bowl. Slips of paper were selected until the numbers of ballots reached the statistical sample sought by the Secretary of State's office.

Then the work began. Each ballot was held up, examined and the candidate's name marked noted on a tally sheet. Any discrepancy was noted, whether an overvote — Houck said some voters in the state literally selected every name listed — or a faint mark that required a decision on the voter's intent.

The recount, announced Wednesday the Idaho Secretary of State was spurred from a document submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office by Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow. In the document, Lindell alleged that every single county in Idaho had been digitally hacked, leading to an 8.4% swing in votes from Donald J. Trump to Joe Biden, also known as “the Big Lie.” In Bonner County, the claim is that the alleged hacking switched 2,244 presidential votes via the internet.

Houck said much of the sheet presented to the Secretary of State's office was "garbage information," the focus was put on the number of ballots in each county that Lindell claimed had been switched. Some counties, like Camas and Butte, have no electronic component to their process; and others like Bonner County, have one tabulation machine.

"It represented the easiest, smallest logistical sample from an operational standpoint, while still being 27,000 ballots so we can get a good sample size to prove the validity of the machine," Houck said.

Rosedale said he volunteered to have Bonner County included in a recount process when the ballot security was being discussed by the Legislature and again when Lindell presented his documentation to state officials.

While the county has electronic poll books, the ballot side and that side of the voting system are not connected and are two completely different systems, Rosedale said.

"We're guarding the reputation of Idaho," the clerk said. "Idaho tries so hard to get it right and I know the county's protocol … and so saying that through the internet, it got changed, is just wrong."

With claims the county was hacked and votes changed after the results had already been sent to state officials is just an impossibility, Rosedale said.

"So this is more like, no you're incorrect. Those are the polite words," he added. "It didn't happen."