When Delawareans vote in their Rep. District (RD) Presidential Primary, some of those votes are actually counted in other Rep. Districts!

The News Journal reported that Representative District 29 was the only RD in Delaware where Bernie Sanders won — I looked up the voting data and Delaware Online reported the wrong numbers — Hillary Clinton won that district. I started looking at the voting data to see if the Election District I live in supported Sanders or Clinton – they supported Sanders. I looked throughout the data to see if any RD supported Sanders over Clinton and I saw that the 13th District supported Sanders over Clinton by only 3 votes — I thought that was odd.

 

Clinton won 1,299 to Sanders 710 29th District.

If you look at the below photo of the votes from the 13th District, it shows that Sanders won that RD by 3.  While I continued to look at the data, I noticed that Election District 09 in the 19th District was missing.  I emailed the Department of Elections to ask why, here is what I was told:

Election Districts are combined in Presidential Primary if they are in the same building since it is all one ballot. Marbrook has both 02-13 and 02-19.  They both reported as 02-13 since that was the lower number.

The 13th District received votes from the 19th District RD from ED 09-19 (Marbrook). The 13th District RD 02-13 and 19th District RD 09-19  (see page 4) share Marbrook Elementary School during elections – they also share votes during the Presidential Primary election. All votes from 09-19 (Marbrook location) were entered into 02-13 – 13th District – I believe that is why Sanders won the 13th District by 3 votes.

Rep. District 13 – 02-13 includes votes from Rep. District 19 – 09-19.

Look at the 19th District vote total below,  you can see that the 19th Election District 09-19 was not reported on the State of Delaware Unofficial Election results.

09-19 voting data is not listed in the above photo.

There are 12 Election Districts in the 19th District and 10 polling locations – two of the 19th District polling locations have 2 ED’s on election day. When the state reports out, they do not show all the ED’s. An example:  If you look at the above photo, 01-19 includes 12-19 voters who vote at DelCastle High School and 07-19 includes 08-19 voters who vote at Stanton Middle School. The above report should reflect where 08-19 and 12-19 voting data is being reported to make it more transparent.

The Representative Districts (RD) should have only their constituents’ votes in a presidential primary election not neighboring districts.

 

Delaware Campaign Finance Glitch

I wanted to get my campaign finance report completed as early as possible, the deadline is January 20, 2016. I had many issues during the 2014 election with filing the 8 day and 30 day reports. The state switched over to a new system and there was an issue with it. The system carried over all primary contributions into the general election which made it appear that a candidate was over their legal allowed amount of $600.00 even though they were not. The Department of Elections had to go into my account and manually fix my reports. I was told it was a glitch and this is what happens with a new system.

So 1 1/2 years later, I went to file my campaign finance report and all the general election contributions from 2014 have carried over into the new election cycle. The new election cycle started January 1, 2015. At this point, it appears, because of the issue, that someone may have contributed to your campaign for this election cycle but in reality they did not. Our total cumulative amount for certain contributors is incorrect and this needs to be addressed. I have reported the issue to the Department of Elections and they are working on it. I wanted to let all candidates know that this is an issue.