Hamilton County election officials were finalizing unofficial results from Tuesday’s local, state and federal races into the night.
Voters made their choices in contests ranging from Signal Mountain to Washington. Hamilton County officials had tallied some of those votes an hour after the polls closed.
The presidential race had not been called by press time.
YEARS OF CHANGE
(READ MORE: Election officials are fighting a tsunami of voting conspiracy theories)
The county continued totaling its own votes Tuesday night at the end of a four-year period marked by changes to voting procedure and the technologies that enable elections.
New state laws required that voters be able to access paper trails for their vote and that absentee ballots include watermarks. Hamilton County also changed the vendor for its voting machines.
Election Systems and Software supplied the county with 130 new voting machines after Hamilton in 2023 became the last county in Tennessee to dispense with Dominion Voting Systems as a machine vendor. Administrator of Elections Scott Allen said the move was motivated by a desire to replace the machines, which the county had used since 2014. Dominion was also the subject of baseless conspiracy theories regarding the accuracy of its machines.
(READ MORE: Hamilton County reports no problems with Dominion voting machines)
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Members of the election commission also acknowledged the influence of conspiratorial thinking and said they hoped to assure voters of the election’s security during a brief meeting Tuesday night before the polls closed.
Election Commission Chair Mike Walden said he wanted to be clear about the integrity of Hamilton County’s elections.
“We’re going to have some of the people, probably from my party, that are going to question everything,” Walden, a Republican, said to Allen, the administrator of elections.
Walden said there had already been an Election Day complaint about premarked ballots.
“Somebody had left a spoiled ballot in a folder and went to return it, and the clerk just put their new ballot in there and gave it to them and didn’t realize there was a ballot in there,” Allen said, “so somebody said, ‘Oh, I got a marked — they’re already marking ballots.’ That’s not the case.”
Walden asked Allen how many different ways the commission audits votes.
“Every step of the process, basically, we’re verifying that, you know, what went in those machines is what’s coming out of them,” Allen said.
The county conducts audits before elections, on the night of elections and following elections, Allen said. The auditing processes involve machine testing, inspection of individual voting precincts and hand counts of ballot applications.
Election commissioners will meet again at 9 a.m. Nov. 20 to certify the county’s official results.
Contact Mariah Franklin at mfranklin@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.