St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts will get the recount he is owed today, though it’s perhaps not exactly the recount he wanted.
Betts lost the Democratic primary to challenger Alfred Montgomery by 256 votes, just slightly more than one half of one percent. That narrow margin means Betts is entitled to a recount. After filing a lawsuit in circuit court last month, one is slated to begin today.
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Attorneys for Montgomery and Betts hashed out the details of that recount process in front Judge Joseph Patrick Whyte on Friday. Whyte described the recount Betts is entitled to as “the automatic automatic” recount, meaning that the sheriff is owed a recount by virtue of the election’s narrow margin—but that only means putting the ballots through the counting machines one more time.
Betts would have to foot the bill for a hand recount. Board of Elections personnel at Friday’s hearing suggested this would cost Betts approximately $10,000. Betts’ lawyer Elkin Kistner indicated the cost “would not be appetizing to my client.”
In court Friday, Kistner expressed concern that if the voting machines hypothetically rendered a faulty result the first time, running the exact same process again would only yield the same error. “If there’s something wrong with the machine, it’s going to reproduce the [same] result ten times,” he said.
Kistner floated the idea that the price of the hand recount could be reduced by hand-recounting the totals in only a few precincts to make sure they match those specific machine totals.
However, Montgomery’s attorney Blake Lawrence pointed out that due to the way in which early voting ballots are counted, this sort of a la carte recount could be onerous in ways a city wide recount isn’t.
At the end of the hearing, Whyte issued an order stating that the city’s Board of Elections Commissioners attempt to have the automatic recount completed by 1:30 p.m. today. Betts will have until 5 p.m. to declare if he would like a further recount by hand.
Betts did not appear at the hearing. Montgomery was there with a handful of supporters.
“During my campaign I promised the citizens of St. Louis to protect their constitutional rights. It is the sheriff’s right to ask for an automatic recount,” Montgomery said. “We should do whatever the statute says to do.”
He added: “It doesn’t matter how many times we count these votes, I’ll be the next sheriff of the city of St. Louis.”
