Cole County Clerk Steve Korsmeyer said he is more confident in the integrity of elections going forward after hearing back from the maker of the county's voting machines and finding out a problem with one of the machines on election night was not a major issue.
Officials with Unisyn, based in the state of California, called Korsmeyer on Tuesday and said they did an audit of the machine which showed the "close ballot" was entered twice when closing the election at the end of the day on April 5.
The problem was with software used at Our Savior's Lutheran Church on Southwest Boulevard where residents of Ward 4, Precinct 1 cast their ballots.
After they got the machine back to the clerk's office to count the votes, staff found the scanner had doubled the ballot count and the votes for each race.
There were 536 ballots cast on the machine and the hand counting of the ballots after the election by the election judges showed 536 ballots.
The closing report on the scanner showed double that amount, or 1,072 ballots cast.
To address the problem, election staff used the absentee voting machine in the clerk's office to scan the ballots for 4/1 and that machine got the count correct.
On Monday, clerk's staff reported all 29 of the machines used April 5 tested out correctly.
Unisyn told Korsmeyer there is an "easy software fix" for the issue, but it will have to be recertified by the Secretary of State's Office before they can release the update for the county's machines.
"When I asked why it happened to our largest precinct, they said because it had more voters than the other machines, and it took it longer to close down," Korsmeyer said. "Unysin also said the safety protocols put in place caught the error like it was designed to. Their explanation made sense to me."