York County recount complete

York County has completed its review of 59,000 ballots prompted by a voting machine programming error in last week’s municipal election.

It took 22 county workers five hours Monday to finish the task, according to President Commissioner Susan Byrnes, who gave an update on the process at the start of the commissioners’ regular meeting Wednesday morning.

They going through the internal paper trail generated by all 620 voting machines in the county, which records voting activity in numeric codes. Counters flagged numbers generated twice in the same block of code, indicating two votes for a candidate on single ballot.

Normally, double-voting wouldn’t be possible, but could have occurred (and did, although it’s not yet clear how many times) because of human error made during programming voting machines that wasn’t caught during testing.

A locally-based outside auditor is doing an “independent verification” of the recount, expected to be complete by the end of the week, Byrnes said Wednesday.

County spokesman Mark Walters declined to identify the auditor and detail the selection process. The county is withholding the information to prevent the auditor from being “inundated with calls,” Walters said, but will release details after the verification is complete.

The county is on track to announce its preliminary recount results at noon Monday. Results will be finalized the following Monday, Nov. 27, which is also the deadline for a report commissioned by the Department of State detailing the county’s missteps and corrective actions.

Read our prior coverage detailing the error here.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect York County’s decision to withhold the name of the auditor verifying the county’s vote recount.