KTKA

Federal service ballots, or ballots the military and overseas voters use to vote, were entered into the wrong column.

The ballots are paper copies. They are not as thick as the ballots you use to vote in person.

Because of this, the votes have to be hand entered. Tuesday night when those 43 votes were entered into the wrong column, a chain of events prevented more than 4,000 votes from being counted.

"It's a horrible feeling when you realized you made a mistake," said Elizabeth Ensley, Shawnee County Election Commissioner.

A mistake that Ensley said has caused candidates to be nervous and voters concerned about the outcome of the primary races.

"I saw quite a few of them that were very close," said Susan Shumaker, Shawnee County voter. "So I'm hoping that they'll get them correctly counted."

"It reminds me of the snafu they had back in Florida, having to count all the chads and everything," said Terrance Abbot, military voter.

Ensley said the numbers given Tuesday night were not the wrong results, but partial results.

She said the error did not change the outcome of the county's primary elections.

"I just have to get the correct numbers out there, that's my job and how that affects the races well everybody has to live with results one way or another," Ensley said.

Federal service ballots are photocopies. They can not be run through a machine called the optical scan.

So, each one has to be hand entered into that column. In this case, they weren't.

"Instead it was accidentally intended for the results coming back from the precincts on the optical scan machine," she said. "Because it had results in that column it did not allow the results to upload from the precincts and that's a safety feature."

Ensley said her heart goes out to the candidates and said she's sorry for letting results get out in an impartial manner.

"I apologize certainly to everybody who was concerned about this race and that's an awful lot of people," she said.

Ensley said the election office will work to find additional safeguards to keep this from ever happening again.

She also said using just one voting system, either paper ballots or electronic voting, would not have prevented this situation.

The one good thing that came out of the error, county election officials found voter turnout was nearly six percent higher than they thought.