VAN BUREN -- Chad Puryear of Hindsville kept his lead in the state House District 25 Republican primary after a recount in Crawford County on Wednesday, but opponent Jody Harris of Fayetteville has not ruled out a court challenge.
Harris requested recounts after trailing Puryear by six votes out of 4,412 cast in unofficial election results on primary night, 2,203 to 2,209. District 25 includes parts of three counties, requiring a recount in each. One provisional ballot each in Washington and Franklin counties added a total of two votes to Puryear in recounts of those counties.
Crawford County Election Commission Chairman Bill Coleman acknowledged in an interview Wednesday during the recount that some absentee ballots were mishandled. The mistake made no difference in the final count, and a poll watcher for Harris oversaw the counting of those absentee ballots on primary night, he said.
Puryear and Nate Bell, a former state legislator and adviser to Puryear's campaign, said there were not enough absentee ballots involved to change the result. Harris' attorney, Clint Lancaster of Benton, contends otherwise.
According to both Lancaster and Coleman, a duplicate is made of any absentee ballot that does not feed properly through the vote counting machines. Absentee ballots are often folded or otherwise bent when going through the mail. In addition, some absentee ballots with the wrong bar codes on them were sent out before the mistake was discovered, Coleman said.
This happened because the redrawing of legislative districts last year left some errors in voting precinct boundaries. The absentee ballots properly cast had to be duplicated on new ballots with the right bar codes on them, he said. In all, 13 ballots from District 25 were involved, but only eight of those ballots included votes cast in this race.
The clean duplicates are counted by machine. Proper procedure is to stamp "duplicate" upon the replicated ballot and "canceled" on the original in such cases. This allows verification of the vote afterward. That was not done, Coleman said.
"It was part of our training, but it was the one thing not done that we probably should have done," he said.
Another problem, according to Lancaster, is that absentee ballots are supposed to be counted first, according to state law.
"There's a reason for that," Lancaster said. "If there's going to be a problem, it's probably going to be with absentee ballots. That's why it's in the law to count them first, so if there is a problem, you can take steps to correct it. Instead, they counted the absentees last."
Harris said voters deserve a transparent vote-counting process and the Crawford County results failed in that regard.
"I'm going to continue to pursue truth and transparency," she said.
Lancaster said his client has the option to challenge the results in either Pulaski or Crawford county courts, but no decision has been made.
"We're talking about eight ballots, not 13," Puryear said.
The count among those eight ballots was five to three in his favor, he and Bell said. Harris would have had to have been the voter's choice in all eight disputed ballots for the issue to make any difference, they said.
Lancaster contends there is no basis for confidence that the right number of ballots were counted and counted correctly.
Chairman Coleman is the brother of state Rep. Bruce Coleman, R-Mountainburg, a supporter of Puryear's. Bruce Coleman donated $1,000 to Puryear's campaign, campaign finance reports show. Their family connection had no influence on the counting of the results, Bill Coleman said.
Election workers at the Crawford County election commission building in Van Buren. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/DOUG THOMPSON)