The Davison County election mess deepened this afternoon when the totals from two new vote counts failed to match.
Election officials did a new count today at the courthouse in Mitchell after a technician fixed the county's voting machine. Following that new count, the ballots were run through the machine a second time.
The precinct vote totals from the two counts matched, but the overall totals did not. As of 4 p.m., officials were trying to determine what happened.
The process has been ongoing since 9:30 a.m., when the county canvassing board convened and a technician from Election Systems & Software, of Omaha, Neb., began working to fix problems with the county's vote-counting machine.
By late morning, the machine was operational and the first new count had begun.
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The process flowed from Davison County Auditor Susan Kiepke's Wednesday acknowledgement of apparent errors in the results from Tuesday's election. She described the errors as test data that may have gotten into the machine and also said hundreds of ballots may have been counted more than once.
This afternoon, she said informally that it appears the winners of Tuesday's elections will not change, but some numbers in the vote totals will.
