Table Games - Kanawha County: Breaking Update

Breaking Update: Kanawha County officials report finding 64 ballots left uncounted after Saturday's special election.

Just 33 votes give Tri-State Racetrack & Gaming Center its margin of victory, on the question of whether to allow the Nitro track to become a full-blown casino.

Clerk Vera McCormick tells The Associated Press that these overlooked ballots will be counted once the canvass of all 175 voting precincts begins Friday.

That audit will also decide the fate of more than 500 as-yet-uncounted ballots that were challenged by precinct workers during Saturday's voting.

The 64 overlooked ballots should have been counted by a Sissonville precinct, and were among the 10,275 that were cast at McCormick's office during early voting.

But the precinct instead shipped them back to McCormick, uncounted, after the polls closed Saturday. They were not discovered until the office reopened Monday.

Three other precincts had similarly erred by not counting their share of early votes. But McCormick's staff found those 155 ballots late Saturday and counted them.

Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper noted to AP that the Saturday votes from this Sissonville precinct were heavily against table games.

MetroNews may have been the first with today's development. The Charleston Gazette also has a story.

AP heard earlier from both sides in advance of the audit. The Gazette also had a report that pegged the number of uncounted ballots at 586.