Last Modified: Thursday, October 27, 2011 1:50 PM

BY ALAN BLINDER / AMERICAN PRESS

Calcasieu Parish’s top elections official said Wednesday that the parish has certified its results from Saturday’s elections.
After a bipartisan group of elections supervisors reviewed the results, Clerk of Clerk Lynn Jones said his office had forwarded the final tally to the Secretary of State’s Office in Baton Rouge.
“Everything is finished on our end, and there were no changes,” he said. “Everything will be the same as what was reported on election night.”
In a separate interview Tuesday, Jones said the primary election on Oct. 22 had been smooth.
“As far as really just the mechanics of the election, it ran on a normal level,” he said.
A new machine to count mail-in ballots malfunctioned, leading Jones and other elections officials to count 10 percent of the ballots — about 400 — by hand.
Jones said the machine was not fully scanning ballots where voters had filled in their selections too lightly. However, the machine alerts officials when it does not completely read a ballot. “If it doesn’t see something right on that ballot, it’s going to kick the ballot,” he said. “Whenever you have a new piece of equipment, you’re always going to have some kind of issue.”
Jones said the malfunctioning machine did not have any effect on the election’s integrity.
“We get a very accurate count,” he said. As officials refine the new scanner after the rigors of a statewide election, Jones said he anticipates the device will be an improvement over previous scanners.
“This scanner is much better than the scanner we had in the past,” he said. “Once they tweak it, I think it’s going to be much more accurate.”
Calcasieu Parish was not alone in having trouble with the machine.
Jones said Beauregard and Cameron parishes had similar, but longer-lasting, difficulties.
“We were still able to finish on time,” he said. “Cameron did not get done into late in the night."