Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

PROVIDENCE -- About two dozen Board of Elections workers this morning are testing voting machines that were re-calibrated to count Smithfield ballots that included the name of a council candidate that had withdrawn his name from the race.

No results from Smithfield have been released.

Chris Barnett, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said the ballots had been revised after Democratic council hopeful Richard A. DiIorio dropped out, but the printing company hired by the state mistakenly used the earlier proof that included the candidate's name.

New ballots were printed and delivered to the town's 10 polling locations around 10 a.m. yesterday.

Last night, election workers started manually transferring the votes from the misprinted ballots onto the new ballots, until they realized they could recalibrate the machines to read the faulty ballots, said Robert Kando, the board of elections' executive director.

Philip Hirons Jr., the town's Republican Town Committee chair, said he and other state Republicans objected to the manual vote transfer.

-- Journal staff writer Kate Bramson

 Tags  Board of Elections election politics RI Smithfield

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