Clay County Commission race in doubt after precincts show zero votes for a candidate
Irregularities in voting results in a Clay County Commission primary on Tuesday have raised substantial doubts about the outcome of the contest. A recount is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
Jon Carpenter, who represents the 15th House District in the Missouri General Assembly, ran for the Clay County Commission’s Western District seat against Clay County Assessor Cathy Rinehart in the Democratic primary. Rinehart won handily in the unofficial results with 73% of the vote.
The margin surprised Carpenter and others, given that he has enough of a profile to have been elected to a House seat in a district that covers Gladstone and parts of Kansas City, North.
“It was very unexpected and I think we now know why the numbers were coming back the way they did,” Carpenter said on Wednesday.
An examination of detailed results shows Carpenter received zero votes in 21 precincts. Rinehart picked up 4,305 votes in precincts in which Carpenter received none. In another precinct, Carpenter got just one vote to Rinehart’s 302.
“It doesn’t take a mental giant to figure out something’s wrong here,” Rinehart said, adding that no one on Wednesday evening had told her of a recount planned the following day.
Patty Lamb, the Republican director of the Clay County Board of Elections, acknowledged the irregularities.
“I will tell you that during our verification process that discrepancies were discovered that you were questioning about,” Lamb said. “These are unofficial election results so we are working on that process.”
It was unclear Wednesday if other races were affected the by the apparent error. However, Tiffany Ellison, Democratic director of the Clay County Board of Elections, said it appears that only Democratic county races may have been affected.
In a statement, the Clay County Board of Elections said its vendor, Adkins Printing, is investigating the cause of the apparent error.
The precincts in which Carpenter received no votes were ones mostly outside his House district — largely North Kansas City and the northern portion of Clay County’s western commission district.
Mark Johnson, an attorney in the Kansas City office of the Dentons law firm whose work includes election law, said several precincts turning up no votes is clearly an inaccurate result, likely the result of a problem with voting machines.
“Zero votes makes no sense,” Johnson said. “Candidates get a lot of votes just by mistake.”
Carpenter said it was fortunate that it was an obvious pattern of irregularities compared to a more discrete counting problem.
“This one was so obvious that it was pretty easy to catch,” Carpenter said. “But yeah, what if the scanners are incorrect but in a less dramatic way? ... Obviously troubling.”
Missouri state Sen. Lauren Arthur, a Kansas City, North Democrat and Carpenter supporter, said she worried that vote-counting errors could cast a shadow over voting in a presidential election year. President Donald Trump has already claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting could result in massive election fraud.
“I hope people don’t feel discouraged by this and, if anything, feel more empowered and make their voice heard,” Arthur said.
The winner of the Carpenter-Rinehart contest will face Republican primary winner and Clay County Collector Lydia McEvoy.
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 5:31 PM.
