More Than 170K Ballots Still Uncounted In Monmouth County: Clerk
MONMOUTH COUNTY - As of Thursday morning, voter selection for the next president still remains clear. The same is the case for local race winners in Monmouth County, including municipal councilmembers, board of education officials or freeholders as over 170,000 votes are still left uncounted, according to Monmouth County Clerk Christine Hanlon.
"There are approximately 175,000 ballots more to count by the Board of Elections. We will be uploading another batch of results soon," Hanlon tweeted to News 12 on Thursday.
What still hasn't been counted yet? Mail-in ballots cast on Election Day, late mail-in ballots, machine votes and provisional ballots submitted Tuesday at the polls.
According to Allan C. Roth, Esq., secretary and commissioner of the Monmouth County Board of Elections, nearly 365,000 ballots have been received by the county so far, but there’s no way to tell how much that total grows until after Nov. 10. According to the official, 150,000 ballots have yet to be counted, not counting provisional ballots.
Roth said Thursday that it’s hard to give an estimated date for counting completion as it’s unclear how many provisional ballots were completed, but the Board of Elections has a “hard” deadline of Nov. 20 to certify.
However, Hanlon estimates that the number of provisional and machine votes in Monmouth County is low, with most voters opting to vote by mail.
"What I'm seeing and what I'm happy about is that it seems the provisional ballot count is going to be low," she told Patch earlier this week.
The returns so far show Biden leading in Monmouth County and Democrats Michael Penna and Moira Nelson leading the county Freeholder race over Republican incumbents Lillian Burry and Ross Licitra.
So what's the reason for the holdup? The process is predominantly done by hand, Roth says. During an election that saw a record voter turnout, the counting process will take some time.
“They’re all done by hand. This is no different than the 1800s, only we run [the ballots] through a machine now,” said Roth. “If there was even an ability to do this all by machine, mistakes happen. Right now, the only way that we can do it is by hand. Everything is done by hand.”
“We’ve been counting since not this Saturday, the Saturday before. We have not processed those that came in on election day, but we’ve been counting for almost three weeks.”
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Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Phil Murphy mandated an election dictated mainly by mail-in ballots: machine voting was essentially forbidden except for those with disabilities, and so most New Jersey residents had little choice but to vote by mail.
The state also extended the deadlines for how late ballots could be mailed back: The state allowed voters to have their ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 and received as late as Nov. 10, a full seven days after Election Day.
If you voted by paper ballot (provisional) at the polls on Tuesday, that vote also will not be counted until Nov. 10 — at the earliest.
But according to Roth, there is no real delay in counting. All ballots in Monmouth County are checked by hand, checked for signatures and opened by hand. In fact, the county recently acquired new computer software that has aided in counting ballots faster and more accurately by being able to detect slashes and stray marks.
“The new software allows us to review ballots that would not be counted until a recount. We’re able to now review those ballots and allow them to be counted, so we have a much more accurate count," Roth told Patch.
“That[system] is new so it’s taking time, but the integrity we felt, the integrity of the election, since this software is newly developed, we wanted as a board to ensure that as many votes - Republican, Democrat, Green Party - all of them count.”
This article originally appeared on the Holmdel-Hazlet Patch
