The county election board reported a total of 4,717 absentee ballots were cast as compared to only 585 during the 2016 presidential election year.

A statement released by the election board said, "In order to have accurate results, the tabulation process is going to take more time than in past years. The LaPorte County Election Board will update with results as appropriate."

“A procedural human error” is being blamed for the LaPorte County Election Board releasing an interim vote total Wednesday that was higher than the final totals released after all the votes were counted Thursday.

“In the election board’s desire to be transparent and tell what we knew at various stages (of the count), we asked the county (voting machine) vendor to run an interim tally on Wednesday night even though there were still precincts to be counted on Thursday,” election board President Andrew Voeltz said in a statement sent to the media Saturday.

“The tally run by Microvote had what Microvote’s’ president acknowledges was ‘higher vote totals than subsequent reports’ due to ‘a procedural human error’ by their technician. The prior night’s totals were doubled up from the prior night leading to the inaccurate totals,” Voeltz said.

After the discovery of the error, it was corrected and Voeltz said, ”We have great confidence in the accuracy and reliability of final totals released Thursday.”

LaPorte was one of the dozen or so counties whose count results were delayed because of the large number of absentee ballots.

“We took all the way to Thursday to get all the tallies done because we didn’t want to rush things on Tuesday with the 5,000-plus absentee ballot to be counted,” Voeltz said. “We were trying to be transparent and show progress at each stage, and it’s unfortunate the Wednesday night interim tallies caused such confusion.”
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A LaPorte County election official and candidate for Clerk of the Circuit Court is calling for an investigation into possibly uncounted absentee ballots from Tuesday's primary election.

Heather Stevens, the co-director of the LaPorte County Board of Voter Registration and Republican candidate for circuit court clerk, said in a news release on Sunday that 89 absentee ballots from Coolspring 3 precinct appear not to be included in the county's final unofficial vote count.

The release said an Indiana Absentee Ballot Report run by Stevens on June 1 showed 68 Democrat and 21 Republican absentee ballots returned and scanned for the precinct.

But, the release added, publicly available precinct-by-precinct results do not reflect the absentee votes from the precinct.

"I know that multiple candidates from both political parties have complaints about how the election has been run, and I believe that most of those complaints are valid." Stevens said in the release. "The voters and candidates of this county deserve better. This is simply unacceptable."

Stevens said she plans to file a complaint with the LaPorte County Election Board and the Indiana Election Division about the vote counting discrepancy.