During the most divisive election in memory, it was business as usual in Macon County.
“We’re very pleased,” said Gary Tallent, deputy director of the Macon County Board of Elections. “We had very, very few issues.”
County election officials completed the vote canvass on Friday, Nov. 13 to make sure that votes had been counted and tabulated correctly. The process results in the authentication of the official results.
Mail-in ballots postmarked by election day and received by Nov. 12 were also counted.
“We had 35 mail-in absentees that came in late,” Tallent said. “We had 34 regular mail-ins and one military ballot that came in from overseas. And we approved 44 provisional ballots that day.”
There is still some work to be done.
“Now we have to go through and separate the early voting and mail-in ballots by precinct, run them back through the machines to make sure it matches our records,” Tallent said. “That’s normal procedure.”
In addition, “Two or three days after any election, the state randomly pick two precincts for a hand count, and that came out perfect,” he said. Those two precincts were Highlands and North Franklin.
Macon County’s turnout was 76.6 percent, or 20,827 out of 27,162 registered voters. State turnout was 75.3 percent.
The June 23 primary election for the 11th Congressional District gave Macon election officials some valuable experience about holding an election in the midst of a pandemic, Tallent said.
“We had plenty of preparation because we had two primaries leading up to it,” he said. “We had experience that most of the state did not. That was beneficial as well.”