(Photo by Gwen Sour) Residents prepare to vote at the Washington County Fairgrounds on Tuesday evening.

The election Tuesday went off without too many problems as voters in Washington County went to the polls for a number of local elections.

Mandy Amos, director of the Washington County Board of Elections, said the county’s nine voting locations, encompassing 50 precincts, were consistently busy throughout the day.

“Everything went pretty smoothly overall,” she said. “Most voting locations were fairly busy.”

Overall, the county saw a 30% turnout for registered voters which came out to around 12,000 people, Amos said.

“We were pretty happy with that,” she said. “That is pretty typical for this type of election.”

There were 76 provisional ballots that will be reviewed by the staff in the Board of Elections office to see if they will be added to the final vote counts. The Board of Elections will meet at 8:30 a.m. Nov. 12 at the Board of Elections office at 204 Davis Ave Suite B in Marietta.

The meeting is open to the public for anyone who wants to observe, Amos said.

The board, which is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, will decide which provisional ballots will be counted and which ones will not.

Things that would cause a ballot to be rejected include not filling out the paperwork properly, signing the absentee ballot, someone not being registered to vote in Ohio, whether someone already voted during the early voting period or they went to the wrong voting location. Reasons the ballot would be counted included a legal name change, moving into the proper voting precinct or someone not bringing in their ID when they voted but bringing it to the Board of Elections within four days of the election to verify their identity.

Currently, there aren’t enough provisional ballots that are expected to impact any particular races, Amos said.

“From our totals, it doesn’t look like any of them have so many that they would be close enough to change by them,” she said.

If any of the races are close, they would do an automatic recount, she said.

Amos said some absentee ballots, postmarked on Election Day, are still coming into the office and will be reviewed during the canvass and determined if they will be counted. Officials will look at the postmark and determine if they will be considered to be counted. She expects some more to come in this week.

She didn’t think there would be any close enough to change any race, but they will determine that once all the absentee ballots are in.

“Our staff will go over them first and go over the dates of the absentees when they come in,” she said. “That determines if we can count them or not.

“We will look at all of that information with all the provisionals too.”

They will present those to the board members and they will make the ultimate decision if they provisional and the absentee ballots can be counted.

Amos said there were no major problems with the voting equipment.

“The equipment worked and all of our poll workers did a great job,” she said, adding they had 104 poll workers across nine voting locations.

Due to procedural issues, any votes cast on the renewal levy for the Washington County Public Library weren’t officially counted due to missing information that prevented the levy from officially going on the ballot. The missing information wasn’t discovered in time for the levy to be removed from Tuesday’s ballot.

“It was a procedural error on that paperwork,” Amos said.

She said the library board will determine if the issue will be put on the ballot during the primary election in May.

Washington County Library Director Justin Mayo said the library board will meet Nov. 19 and determine if they want to put the levy back on the ballot for May.

“That will be the first decision,” he said.

The levy was a renewal of a 1 mil levy that passed in 2010. Mayo said they have been able to reduce down to a $500,000 levy for the past 15 years.

“I won’t put it on for another mill,” he said. “We don’t need that much money.

“It is enough to cover operating costs.”

It was a mistake in the approval process between the county and the state where things were not properly done for it to properly be on the ballot as the commission did not officially vote to have it put on the ballot. As far as the mistake that prevented the measure from officially being on the ballot, the county commission knows what needs to be done and how to address things the next time.

“They won’t make the same mistake twice,” Mayo said. ” Everyone is aware of it and hopefully we won’t have this problem again.”