Sedgwick County election workers are going through thousands of mail and provisional ballots from the November 3rd general election.

The mail ballots arrived later in the day or they were collected from drop boxes and polling places, and election commissioner Tabitha Lehman said workers are in the process of counting those ballots and adding them to the results.   Lehman said the results will be updated over the next few days.  The final election results are scheduled to be certified on November 13th.

Lehman estimated there could be around 8,000 provisional ballots.  She said there were people who requested a mail ballot and then went to a polling place, so a provisional ballot had to be filled out.  There were also people who went to the wrong polling place, and they may have had a provisional ballot with the wrong races on it.   She said each provisional ballot has to be researched manually.   Some mail ballots also had to be counted by hand because they were damaged in the mail.

The county had a turnout of 60.88 percent with the initial results, and the counting of the mail and provisional ballots will add to that percentage.  Lehman said the county set records for advance voting and mail ballots, but the turnout on election day did not equal the advance vote numbers.   There were 133,709 people who voted in person in advance or by mail.