Differences between a recanvass and a recount

When Whitley County officials do their recanvass of seven races Thursday morning one thing that won’t be happening is re-opening the voting machines or conducting an actual recount of the votes.
While many people use the terms recount and recanvass interchangeably in a generic sense, in the legal sense they are two different processes.
During a recanvass, like the one that will take place Thursday at 9 a.m. in either the clerk’s office or the fiscal court meeting room, what will essentially happen is that county officials will recheck their math to make sure that all the vote tallies are correct in the seven races being recanvassed, and that no one transposed any numbers while recording the results.
The Whitley County Board of Elections and its chairperson, Whitley County Clerk Tom Rains, will take the totals printed out of the back of each election machine on election night, and add them together again to make sure that the totals added up with what was entered into the official election book on election night. Each voting precinct had at least two machines this year.
In addition, the absentee votes will be tallied again as well.
The totals in the election book will also be added again to verify that they are correct.
“On a recanvass, we don’t even open a machine. There is no machine to be opened,” Rains said. “On the races where they have asked for a recanvass, we will call out the added totals and match it against my book totals.”
While it is possible that some numbers might have been transposed election night, Rains said he doubts that the results will change given the margins of victory in all the races.
He said that conducting a recanvass is nothing new for his office, and that usually at least one candidate asks for one every election.
“I don’t blame anybody. If they want to do a recanvass that is their right,” Rains said.
Rains said the machines would only be re-opened during a recount, which would have to be ordered by a circuit judge as part of a lawsuit. In order to ask for a recount, a candidate must first ask for a recanvass.
During a recount, which would have to be paid for by the person filing the lawsuit if they lost the recount, a judge would order that the machines be reset, and would conduct test voting on the machines to make sure that they tallied votes correctly.
Rains added that his staff went back through and did a spot check of the totals the day after the election, and found no changes.
The Whitley County Board of Elections has three other members besides the county clerk, who sits on it by law. The Whitley County Sheriff serves on the board unless he is running for office, and then he designates someone to serve in his place, which in this case was Chief Deputy Tim Shelley.
The board also has a Republican representative, Nancy Jones, and a Democratic representative, Damon Brown.