"All in all I think it went very, very well," County Clerk Janice Cosco said Wednesday of the election.
Cosco spent Wednesday at the county election center cleaning and picking up odds and ends from Tuesday's events, which included the collecting of all the precincts and printing of the unofficial results after the polls closed at 7:30 Tuesday night.
Just over an hour after the deadline, Cosco said all of the county's 76 precincts had returned results to the election center. And if it had not been for a minor battery issue with one precinct, the results would have been returned by 9 p.m., she said.
"The precincts did well. There were just a few minor glitches with closing precincts," she said. The official return time for the final results was around 9:30 p.m., Cosco said.
According to unofficial results, more than 11,300 ballots were cast during the election, which Cosco said is a typical number for an off-year election.
"It was not an election with a lot of interest," Cosco said of the primary, which had only one local contested race and one statewide one.
She said she actually expected a lower voter turnout had it not been for the interest in the 1st Congressional District race, which had two Democrats and six Republicans on the ballot.
Locally, the only real contested race was for circuit clerk, which was won by longtime incumbent Barb Core. However, with two Democrats on the ballot for the 13th District State Senate seat representing portions of Marion and Monongalia counties, some voters apparently got confused and actually voted for a candidate who bowed out of the race last month.
Ron Justice, who officially resigned his candidacy citing health problems, received more than 58 percent of the voter majority over Robert "Bob" Beach. But because he was not technically a candidate, Beach still won the Democratic bid for the general election. Justice also received the voter majority in Monongalia County.
Cosco explained that Justice removed himself from the race too late to be taken off the ballot, so Democrat voters could still check the box next to his name. But because he is no longer a registered candidate, he cannot take the seat despite receiving the majority of the votes.
"Once you withdraw your name it's like you don't exist," Cosco said.
The only other races that really stood out during this year's primary were the board of education, which returned three incumbents, and the four levies, all but one of which passed.
Cosco also said Wednesday that the voter turnout for Independent and No-Party voters, which there was an influx of this year as compared to years past, was not very high, with only 124 casting ballots.
"With the interest in Independent and No-Party registered voters, that was a little surprising," Cosco said of these numbers.
But because Independent and No-Party voters were allowed to vote on either the Democrat or Republican tickets, Cosco pointed out that this number is not necessarily indicative of the total number of these voters who came out to the polls.
The next step for the election is finalizing the results at the official canvass on Friday.
The canvass is a requirement issued under the state Legislature and will begin Friday morning. The county's canvassing board, made up of the three county commissioners, and four teams of poll workers set up equally with two Democrats and two Republicans each, will go through the results by hand, count them and compare them to the electronic results calculated Tuesday night from the Ivotronic voting machines. Four precincts will be chosen at random for this task, and will result in the official tallies for the election.
Until then, all the results are unofficial. Cosco said Wednesday that she does not expect the results of any of the races to change following the canvass, and she does not anticipate recounts for any of the races.
E-mail Mallory Panuska at mpanuska&.timeswv.com.