Never again, Johnson County election chief vows after long-delayed results

Twelve hours after the country’s next president was announced and long after most people across Kansas knew who’d won what, the complete results in Johnson County finally materialized.

A glitch in the scanning of mail-in ballots caused a massive delay and sent workers scrambling Tuesday evening, and into Wednesday afternoon, to understand what had happened. Some election staffers worked more than 24 hours straight, including county election commissioner Ronnie Metsker, who has been in the post only nine months.

Definitely not the way a new commissioner wants to mark his first presidential election. By 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, when the unofficial final results had been posted on the office’s website, Metsker all but said so to his staff.

“Here’s to never having an election like this ever, ever again,” Metsker told his team as he offered up his fist for everyone to bump.

Officials across Johnson County seconded the vow. Ed Eilert, chairman of the Johnson County Commission, said everything with the election and the preparation for it — from voter registration to advance voting — had gone off without a hitch.

“Then to have something like this occur is doubly frustrating,” Eilert said. “When everything is done and settled, there will be a complete review and decisions made to keep it from happening in the future.”

The glitch that frustrated voters and officials happened Tuesday evening after the polls had closed as staff members were handling mail-in ballots. Workers had hoped to complete those ballots before it was time to process machine votes from Election Day.

But Metsker said the office received such a high number of mail-in ballots on Monday, and more on Tuesday, that workers couldn’t get through them all in time. One of Monday’s four mail deliveries included 12 trays of ballots with roughly 430 ballots on each tray.

As workers continued processing the mail-in ballots Tuesday evening, they realized something was wrong. Some of the ballots being scanned weren’t being recorded.

“We overwhelmed our system with the scanning of paper ballots,” Metsker told reporters at 2 a.m. Wednesday, seven hours after polls closed.

Workers cannot process machine ballots at the same time as mail ballots. So workers tried to finish the ballots they had already started.

The good news, Metsker said early Wednesday, is nothing was lost.

“The paper ballots are still here,” he said. “They’re good. They can be rescanned. It just takes time.”

Metsker, a longtime chairman of the Johnson County Republican Party, replaced election commissioner Brian Newby, who left in November to become executive director of the federal Election Assistance Commission.

After Newby left Johnson County, an audit identified more than $39,000 in costs it considered questionably related to Newby’s duties. Last month, The Associated Press reported that emails it had obtained showed that Newby was having an affair with a subordinate who helped him avoid oversight of his spending.

He also has drawn fire in his current job, when he was accused of ruling on a voter registration issue to please Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Newby has denied doing anything wrong.

Metsker said the aim for this election was to be efficient, maintain integrity and make the process easy for voters. That’s why Tuesday evening and the delay was difficult.

“What I seek to do is the right thing in the right way in the right time and speak the truth,” he said.

Kobach, who appointed Metsker in January, said Metsker showed good judgment in handling the software glitch.

“The election commissioner doesn’t have to be a technology geek,” Kobach said. “The election commissioner has to be able to manage and understand other people who are the principal technology people in the office. He also has to be very trusted and respected by other people in the county. Ronnie really fit the bill.”

Even as more results trickled out Wednesday, prominent Kansas Republicans said it was still unclear to them what exactly had caused the slowdown.

Kelly Arnold, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, spoke highly of Metsker in a phone interview Wednesday but said delays in results could be frustrating.

“We like to see our election results come out the evening of the election and not have to wait until the next morning to find out who won,” Arnold said. “You have a lot of emotions, a lot of energy, that go into these campaigns. Sitting there expecting to see whether or not as a candidate you win or lose, or your campaign you’re working for won or lost, is something we really like to see on the evening of the election.”

Johnson County Republican Party chairman Mike Jones said he has zero concerns with Metsker at the helm. During the Republicans’ election night watch party in Overland Park, people made light of the lengthy delay.

“Ronnie’s been put into a situation where he feels like something happened,” Jones said. “And at this point, it’s more important to get it right than to get it fast.”

This story was originally published November 9, 2016 at 7:16 PM with the headline "Never again, Johnson County election chief vows after long-delayed results."