In the most recent instance, Republican candidate Luana Stoltenberg defeated Democrat Craig Cooper in a battle for the state House in Iowa after a manual count of the votes revealed that the results of the machine count were incorrect.

On election night, WQDA-TV announced that Stoltenberg had won her contest by a margin of 29 votes.

Officials attempted to do a machine recount on November 15 due to the extremely close outcome, but that effort was abandoned after the tabulator machine continually jammed.

Following a hand recount on November 17 and a second machine recount on November 18, Cooper was in the lead by a margin of six votes.

Stoltenberg regained the lead this week by 11 votes after one more hand count.

The Iowa House District 81 race has taken another twist, after the latest ballot recount determined that Republican Luana Stoltenberg is the winner. https://t.co/f5xAS7ufcA

— WQAD (@wqad) December 8, 2022

There have been other tight contests across the nation where preliminary tabulation mistakes led to the wrong candidate being declared the victor.

Karma Metzler Fitzgerald, a Democrat, believed she had won a state House seat in Idaho by 383 votes against Jack Nelsen, a Republican. It turned out that Nelsen had won by 84 votes instead after a tabulating error was fixed.

In a state House contest in New Hampshire last month, a recount resulted in Democrat Maxine Mosley defeating Republican Larry Gagne by one vote as opposed to a loss by 23 votes.

During the Georgia primaries in the spring of last year, one of the more spectacular outcomes of the 2022 midterm cycle occurred.

Michelle Long Spears, a Democrat running for Dekalb County Commission, finished third in the original machine-tabulated results that were published on May 24. As a result, she was not eligible for a runoff.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution stated that “Spears and her team, though, noticed that initial results showed her receiving zero election votes at most precincts in the district.”

Spears gained more than 3,600 votes and moved up to first place after a hand count during the Memorial Day weekend. In the general election, she faced no opposition after winning her runoff in June.

More on this story via The Western Journal:

The Georgia secretary of state’s office admitted to making several programming mistakes in its Dominion Voting Systems machines.

In 2020, a hand-count conducted in the entire state of Georgia following the general election also revealed that thousands of ballots had not been counted. Those discrepancies were also attributed to human error in the uploading of ballots to the machines.

Then-President Donald Trump ended up netting more than 1,200 votes, but it was not enough to change the overall result. CONTINUE READING…