Though election workers at State College Precinct 26 overlooked 2,080 ballots Tuesday, the votes -- when counted Wednesday -- did not affect a failed referendum that would have eliminated term limits for State College Borough Council members.
Election officials at Friends Meetinghouse, 611 E. Prospect Ave., were alerted to the error when the number of ballots counted Tuesday night did not match up with the number of voters that records indicated had voted at the precinct, Centre County Commis-sioner Jon Eich said.
"Frankly, no one in Bellefonte thought to look in the vault one more time," he said. "I'm relieved it was a relatively simple human error that was easily corrected once we got all the puzzle pieces back together."
Upon examining the vault where all ballots were placed, election workers discovered the additional ballots, Eich said.
Before counting the retrieved ballots, it was "unlikely" but possible that they could have significantly influenced the election, overturning voters' rejection of the term limits measure, Eich said.
"I suppose if everybody in that precinct voted for the term limits, it could have an impact," he said. "But I was in about 10 polling places in State College yesterday, and that was the race that more voters skipped than any other."
The final tally for the proposition, after counting the recovered ballots, was 8,050 votes to abolish term limits and 9,567 votes to keep them, Eich said.
The results released Wednesday are "unofficial," Eich said.
Official Centre County results will be available sometime next week.
Friends Meetinghouse had machine problems during the day, causing the county to "swap out" voting machines in the afternoon, Eich said.
The Centre County Board of Commissioners voted in July to replace touch screen voting machines with optical scan models, a technology switch that made the Friends Meetinghouse situation easier to fix, Eich said.
"One of the things I like is that we were able to, separate of the machine, identify that there was an issue and then find the ballots to correct," he said.
