Election integrity remains a hot topic of debate on Capitol Hill. President Donald Trump continues to contest the 2020 election results, as accusations of “voting irregularities” fly.

But the issue affects all elections, small and large. Election officials, politicians, and lawmakers are on the lookout for mistakes in the process, in order to provide citizens with accurate results.

And sometimes, those results can change.

For example, a town clerk in Connecticut recently discovered an “error” that caused one of the state’s races to be called for the Democrat candidate.

Initially, it looked like GOP House Rep. Craig Fishbein had lost to Democrat challenger Jim Jinks. However, as it turns out, the aforementioned error played a huge role in messing up the results.

Reportedly, the problem stemmed from unreported votes. From Breitbart (via The Mirror):

Connecticut GOP House Rep. Craig Fishbein was declared the loser in the race for his seat until a town clerk found an “error” had caused the race to be called for his Democrat opponent.

Wallingford town clerk Barbara Thompson said Tuesday her office discovered that votes had not been recorded in the state’s reporting system from Yalesville Elementary School, reported CT Mirror.

Thompson said she didn’t know if it was a clerical mistake or a computer error in the system. But either way, it’s a good thing she caught it.

For whatever reason, none of the votes collected from one of the polling locations (Yalesville Elementary School) simply weren’t recorded.

So now, as of yesterday, the unofficial results show Fishbein ahead of Jinks. The margin remains very tight (less than 0.50 percent), but it’s a significant change from Jinks being declared the winner.

The Mirror added that the deadline for reporting final results was extended this year. Due to the mass influx of absentee ballots, they had 96 hours to produce those results.

And as for the “error,” secretary of the state spokesman Gabe Rosenberg said “there’s no circumstance when an error like that is not caught and corrected.”

That may be true, but it does raise more questions concerning the speed and reliability of our current system. Some will argue that it remains at least somewhat compromised.

Furthermore, though the error was indeed caught in this case, it wasn’t caught until one of the candidates had mistakenly been named the winner.

That is another point of contention: media outlets proclaiming winners and losers before the final results are tallied and certified.

This will undoubtedly remain a key topic of debate in the future, especially if mail-in balloting remains popular.

Key Takeaways:

• Due to an “error” in one election, a Democrat candidate in CT was mistakenly announced as the winner.
• The state hadn’t counted any votes from one of the polling locations. After doing so, it turns out the GOP candidate was actually in the lead.
• Though a spokesman says such errors are always caught, it’s important to note that this mistake wasn’t caught until after the winner was declared.

https://americanjournaldaily.com/democrat-winner-error-gop-candidate/