Early Tuesday storms, power outages delay Mississippi County election results

CHARLESTON, Mo. — Mississippi County's municipal election results will be delayed due to severe storms and power outages Tuesday, April 2.

“We were out of power countywide except for one polling place, which was Wyatt,” said Mississippi County Clerk Emily Pullen.

According to Pullen, the storm hit early Tuesday. Around 4:30 a.m., the power went out and three polling places were without power with voting starting at 6 a.m.

“Charleston’s power did come on late this morning, so we were able to get them up and running,” Pullen said. “Any time there’s a power outage, we do have a battery back up on our machines, but they only last a couple hours.

Pullen continued: “We do have emergency bins that the ballots go in (when there is no electricity) and as we were able to get the machines back up and running with the battery backups, we were running the ballots through but the batteries have since died again.”

According to Pullen, all election judges placed all voted ballots in a voted ballot box and brought each polling location's machines to and plugged them into the Mississippi County Courthouse power to run the voting reports.

“The ballots that were in the emergency bin have been put into a sealed box so we can re-run those, and the ones that were able to be run in there won’t be counted twice,” Pullen said. “That’s whats going to delay us — because we are also going to make sure and go back through and hand count each machine to make sure every ballot was counted. We want to make sure that the power glitch did not cause anyone’s ballot to not be counted.”

Pullen said she plans to have the votes counted by noon Wednesday, April 3.

The only contested race on the Mississippi County ballot was for Charleston’s city councilperson.Voters chose two of three candidates: Philip Halter, Cedrick Polk and Jason Oliver.

Voters in the town of Anniston also answered the question: “Shall the Town of Anniston be dissolved?”

Check back to the Standard Democrat’s website at www.standard-democrat.com and Friday’s edition of the Standard Democrat for Mississippi County’s vote totals.