Actually, I'm hearing all kinds of misinformation about the recount and related issues. We've had different people who wanted us to check to make sure everyone had been required to show their ID before voting. I know that is the law in some state, but not in Idaho (so far). That's an issue for the legislature not the elections office. ... We've also heard that people are wondering how many ballots that we'll be counting that came in after election day. The number is zero. Again, some states allow ballots to be counted up to 10 days after election day if they were postmarked by election day. Not in Idaho though/Dan of the County. Full post below.

Question: Do you have any questions for Dan of the County re: the Tuesday elections?

The answer as to why different races generate different amounts of votes cast even in the exact same district is because not all people vote for all things on a ballot. This is very common knowledge to anyone who has worked around elections. People (often anyway) vote for the race they are most excited about, most fearful of the “wrong one” getting in, etc. For confirmation you can go to the archives section of our elections page where there are years of past election results to look at.

As an example, in the 2008 election you had over 62,500 votes for President but only 58,000ish for two different commissioner races, yet over 61,000 votes (mostly no votes) on the question of people paying higher vehicle registration fees.

I'll share a point of clarification on recounts in Idaho. We will certainly conduct a proper recount because it will be according to Idaho Code. It will under the direct supervision of the Attorney General and Secretary of State. However, it won't involve a manual inspection for under votes or over votes other than ballots that were rejected by the counting machines on election night and then duplicated with a ballot that could be read by the machine.

Idaho Code 34-2305 specifies that a recount will be done by the same people and in the same manner as on Election Day. Our ballots were counted by optical scanners so they will be recounted the same way. There is no provision to do a hand recount of an election that was originally counted by machine. I realize election law and practices vary from state to state.