by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — The 2012 General Election is in the books, but now comes the aftermath. Here are answers to three issues that came out of Tuesday’s election in Sumner County.

The Ed Trimmer vs. Larry Alley race:

The 79th District State Representative race involving Larry Alley-R and Ed Trimmer-D, both of Winfield, is still unsettled.

First of all, there is the final tally count. The state representative race that involved three Sumner County townships including the towns of Belle Plaine and Oxford and the northwest corner of Cowley County including Winfield, had an erroneous set of numbers on the Kansas Secretary of State Website earlier this morning. The final tally has Trimmer with 4,142 votes compared to Alley with 4,105. Sumner Newscow and Newscow.net has 4,115 to 4,097. Both receiving 50 percent of the vote from these counts. Earlier this morning on the SOS site and which is still being reported on another Wellington news site, that the figures were Trimmer: 4,581 to Alley’s 3,631. This was due to a reporting error between the Sumner County Clerk’s office and the SOS office. It has now been corrected on the SOS site.

The fate of this election will depend on provisional ballots, which are deemed to be votes in question.
This can be due to a number of factors such as not having proper identification, moving from one precinct to the other, poll worker error, machine error, etc.

There are 262 provisional ballots in Sumner County and 650 provisional ballots in Cowley County that will need to be reviewed by the Election Board of Canvassers which are the county commissioners.

Cowley County will look at the provisional ballots and verity the election on Monday. Sumner County will look at the provisional ballots on Thursday, because Monday the courthouse is closed due to the Veteran’s Day holiday.

With the vote being less than an 18 or 37-vote difference, the provisional ballot vote could significantly alter this particular race. Another question that remains with this race is how many of the approximately 912 provisional ballots in Sumner and Cowley County, will have the 79th District race included. The provisional ballots of the three Sumner County townships are the only ones that would affect that particular race, and that in Winfield.

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Peck Improvement District: 

It was reported that Debbie Tussey had 29 and Shirley Burns had 24 votes for Peck Improvement District officers. What was reported incorrectly is both will get elected for two officer spots instead of one office position. There were also Sedgwick County voters for this particular race and the Sumner Clerk’s office did not have those figures from Sedgwick this morning.

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Election delays: 

Several people in Ward 4 of Wellington, which includes the western part of the community, were complaining about the long wait and machine breakdown. Some said they were waiting as long as 45 minutes.

Sumner Clerk Debra Norris said this was due to a program glitch with the electronic poll books which tend to power down on occasion and need to be powered back up. However, ward 4 also had an exceptional number of voters compared to the other three wards in Wellington, almost twice as much.

This will change next year as Wellington is going to an at large voting format and will no longer have wards or precincts.

Thus, when people come to vote they will be shared equally amongst the election workers.

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There were 9,088 votes cast on Tuesday and with advanced voting for a 57.86 percent registered voter turnout.