For the second time in two elections, Douglas County officials accidentally double-counted advance ballots.
Tuesday night's miscount means a possibly different outcome for two candidates in the Lawrence City Commission race.
Because of a miscount in Tuesday's primary election results, Douglas County Clerk Patty Jaimes won't know who the sixth and final city commission candidate is Friday.
Douglas County Clerk Patty Jaimes said the error was discovered Wednesday morning when officials realized "the numbers weren't adding up."
"It's frustrating to me," she said. "Here we go again."
Tuesday's count showed Jennifer Chaffee beating Adam Mansfield by 10 votes, 570 to 560, in the race to be the sixth Lawrence City Commission candidate to advance to the April 3 general election.
The revised, but still unofficial, count Wednesday gave Mansfield a one-vote lead, 522 to 521. Jaimes did not explain why, if the double-counted votes were recounted once, that didn't simply narrow Chaffee's margin to five votes.
The Tuesday election narrowed the field of candidates for city commission from 12 to six. Three commissioners will be selected from that slate.
The count won't be official until Friday morning, when Douglas County commissioners will determine the fate of four dozen "provisional" ballots that weren't counted Tuesday because of questions about voter eligibility.
Mansfield took little comfort in his new lead.
"I'll wait until Friday and see what happens then, when it becomes official," he said. "But it's nicer to be one vote ahead instead of 10 votes behind. It goes to show one vote really does count. If you win by one vote or 100, you're still the one moving on."
Chaffee did not return calls seeking comment. Jaimes said no other race outcome was changed by the recount.
In November, Jaimes said the double-counting was the result of election officials forgetting to set ballot-tracking software to distinguish between advance and regular ballots. That error changed the final tally that candidates received, but did not affect who won and lost the election.
Under's Wednesday's revised tallies, Adam Mansfield (left) now leads Jennifer Chaffee by one vote for the sixth-place spot in Tuesday's primary. The top six finishers go on to compete April 3 for three seats on the Lawrence City Commission.
"We have learned from it," Jaimes said in November. "It was an accident."
Officials used a different way to make the same mistake in Tuesday's count, she said. Advance and regular ballots were to be counted separately, and the totals added together at the end of counting.
But election officials forgot, in essence, to roll back the odometer on the vote-scanner after advance ballots were counted. As a result, those totals were included in the regular ballot counting, and added in again at the end of the process.
Tuesday's election was the third time Douglas County had used the ballot-scanning system bought from Election Systems & Software Inc. Jaimes said the problems were caused by insufficient training for her clerks from the company.
"I don't know if we would say that," said Sue McKay, ESS director of customer service.
McKay said the company has 874 customers using a system similar to the one used by Douglas County. Such errors are rare, she said, but a customer-service representative will write new machine guidelines to help Douglas County officials correctly use the scanners.
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