Dallas County failed to report 5,842 votes cast in 2016 election

Thousands of ballots in Dallas County went uncounted on Election Day last November because of a mistake in how county officials reported their results to the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office.

Election officials at the state and county level stressed that the missing votes did not change the outcome of any election on the ballot in the suburban metro county, despite the magnitude of the error.

A total of 5,842 absentee ballots went unreported on Election Day and throughout the official certification process. That total amounts to 13 percent of the 44,430 ballots cast in the county and almost one-third of all the absentee votes cast.

“Remarkably, what they failed to report were proportional with how the rest of Dallas County voted, so it did not change one single race anywhere,” said Dawn Williams, the elections director at the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office. “It changed the results, but not who was elected.”

Read more: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/08/dallas-county-failed-report-5842-votes-cast-2016-election/97665238/