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August 7, 2012
It was a long night for candidates and an even longer night for Sedgwick County election officials.
A computer entry error led to inaccurate returns from Tuesday's primary and a long wait for the final results.
"The percentages of the votes that I was seeing really didn't surprise me that much. But the number of votes and the number of precincts that were reporting so early was a little unbelievable," said Sedgwick County voter Dan Dickgrafe.
He wasn't alone in his confusion. The initial primary returns hit the election commission website around 8:15 p.m. They showed 257 precincts reporting, with just a small number of votes cast.
"Later into the evening I realized they'd found some sort of mistake or error and then that made it a much longer night for all of us that were watching on TV," Dickgrafe said.
Eyewitness News relies on the website to provide viewers with accurate and timely returns. So one mistake -- or in this case one checked box on a computer -- led to thousands of people being misinformed.
"It's just learning and we know now not to ever do that again," said Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman.
Lehman said normally when advance voting numbers are reported, the system will show zero precincts reporting. However, when a box was incorrectly checked on a computer, the website displayed every precinct in which an advanced ballot had been cast, as being fully reported.
Lehman, who was presiding over her first major election since her appointment last November, said the mistake was immediately recognized. However, it couldn't be corrected on the website because of tampering safeguards built into the computer system.
Lehman said the final results weren't published until after 11:00 p.m. because she didn't want any more mistakes.
"This was new to us. So we repeated the same mistake that was made many years ago," Lehman said.
The election commissioner plans to work closely with staffers to review all procedures before the presidential election in November.
