By Sam Wildow
swildow@aimmediamidwest
TROY — The Miami County Board of Elections certified the Nov. 2 election results during a meeting on Wednesday evening.
The Nov. 2 election saw an overall turnout of 26.33% of registered voters. There are 75,401 registered voters in Miami County, and there were 19,856 total ballots cast during that election.
The Board of Elections received 160 provisional ballots for the Nov. 2 election, rejecting 14 of those provisional ballots for a variety of issues on Wednesday, including the voters not being registered.
Of the provisional ballots that were rejected, two of them were rejected due to the voters voting twice. One of the voters had submitted a blank ballot by mistake on Election Day and requested to vote provisionally. Board of Elections Director Laura Bruns said they did have a blank ballot among the Election Day ballots, but “there’s no way to verify that it is the blank ballot.”
The other voter who voted twice claimed that items were missing from his first ballot, so he voted a second time provisionally.
Both of those provisional ballots were rejected.
The board also received approximately 46 absentee ballots that had been postmarked before the election and were received by the board within the 10-day time frame after the election.
The closest race in the Nov. 2 election was between Theresa Packard and Thomas Kleptz for the Troy Board of Education. There was a difference of 105 votes, or a margin of 0.78%, between Packard and Kleptz. The difference would have to be 0.5% or lower for an automatic recount to be triggered, so there will no automatic recount for that race. The candidates can request for a recount, and the cost would be $55 per precinct to the candidate.
Also on Wednesday, the board accepted the city of Troy’s new ward map that was presented to the board. The city of Troy updated its ward map due to the 2020 census results. Deputy Director Ian Ridgeway said 99% of all those changes were moving one or two blocks from one ward to the next. The board will have to adjust some of the voters’ precincts, and board member Audrey Gillespie asked for letters, not postcards, to be sent to voters whose precincts will be changing following the ward changes.
The board is also waiting to hear from Piqua and Huber Heights on any adjustments to the wards in their cities following the census.
The board also revisited its initiative of looking at school districts to use as voting locations.
“I did reach out to Piqua Catholic School. They are not interested in serving as a polling location,” Bruns said. She added the board’s office still plans on visiting two other districts, including Bethel and Newton.
