Election officials in the region expect to certify the results of the Nov. 3 election Friday, the deadline for certification, they reported Thursday evening.
But there will be no relaxation for county boards of elections — the entities that have counted tens of thousands of paper vote-by-mail and provisional ballots cast in each county. Now, they have to prepare to audit 2% of the vote, said Atlantic County Board Clerk Sue Sandman.
“All the ballots we did we put into batches of 200,” Sandman said of preparation for the audit. Each batch was numbered.
There will be a random drawing, and batch numbers will be pulled for 2% of the batches — that’s about 14 batches of the roughly 700 — which will be hand counted to make sure the results are the same as the machine results, she said.
Gov. Phil Murphy originally gave boards until Dec. 4 to finish the audit but is expected to extend that to Dec. 11, officials said.
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“It will be good for people to know — to give them some confidence with how the process works,” Cape May County Clerk Rita Fulginiti said.
Still, the certification will be a big milestone.
“We have finished counting all ballots as of yesterday afternoon,” Cape May County Registrar Mike Kennedy said Thursday in an email. “The Clerk’s Office will be posting the results, and we certify the election (Friday).”
Cumberland County’s Board of Elections was slow to get started counting its ballots and fell behind other counties for a time but has caught up, officials said.
“The election results were uploaded last evening after the Board of Elections presented our office with their final count,” Cumberland County Clerk Celeste Riley said Thursday in an email.
Voters had until late Wednesday to respond to “cure” letters sent to them requesting a clarified signature and proof of identity, in order for their ballots to be counted. Those whose vote-by-mail and provisional ballots were not signed or which had signatures that did not match those on file got the letters.
The Atlantic County Board of Elections had sent out about 1,700 cure letters and received more than 600 back; Cape May County’s board sent out 523 and received responses on 343; and Cumberland County’s board sent out 775 and got responses from 304, according to spokespeople.
As of Thursday afternoon, the Atlantic County clerk was still reviewing some later arriving hand-count numbers from the Board of Elections before putting the results online.
Hundreds of provisional ballots had to be hand counted — mostly the result of people going to the wrong polling place in Atlantic City and voting in a ward race they should not have voted in, Atlantic County Board of Elections Chair Lynn Caterson said. For those voters, their ward votes could not be counted, but the rest of the votes on the ballot could be. A scanner could not be used in that circumstance, Caterson said.
