WASHINGTON COUNTY, Utah — In Southern Utah, the recount results from Washington County that were expected Thursday afternoon in the close Congressional District 2 race between incumbent Celeste Maloy and Colby Jenkins have been delayed.
Washington County Clerk Ryan Sullivan says when election staff went to finalize the results, an error message was received that some ballots weren’t fully reviewed. He said out of an abundance of caution, an audit of the ballots in question will be conducted and the county recount results will be finalized Monday.
“I don't dare have a canvas and not feel comfortable with the numbers,” Sullivan said.
Earlier in the day, county election officials ran an audit of 3 percent of the votes. That is larger than the usual 1 percent of ballots that are checked because of the recount. It was the second audit since the election and because of the software error, a third will be conducted on Friday.
Sullivan says a larger audit was necessary with 211 votes separating the two candidates.
“If there's a recount, the code says it is 3%, so it has an additional couple percent, so a little over 1,000 ballots were examined.
During the audit, some ballots were flagged as potentially being invalid and reviewed. Of those Fox 13 saw, just about all were unmarked ballots. One had a derogatory message written out for President Joe Biden but was declared valid.
As Washington County made up 34 percent of all ballots in CD-2 and was one of two counties that had Jenkins in the lead, the recount there is crucial to his 211-vote gap with Maloy.
Jenkins has been challenging the result in the Utah Supreme Court, saying that some mail-in ballots and declared invalid were sent to an out-of-state processing center in Las Vegas and postmarked after election day.
The county is now under the gun, as all counties are supposed to finalize their results by late Monday.
