By Glenn Rolfe

SEAFORD — A special meeting of the city’s Board of Elections has been called for Monday to address a clerical error in last weekend’s municipal vote.

The inaccuracy resulted in an incorrect tally of absentee ballots, as well as total votes, on Saturday.

Though the miscount will impact those numbers, the outcome of the election — in which Mayor David Genshaw and Councilman Matt MacCoy were reelected — will not change, City Manager Charles Anderson said.

“It will affect the total number of votes and number of absentee ballots,” said Mr. Anderson. “The vote tallies of who voted for whom does not change. That was accurate.”

Monday’s meeting of the board — chairman H. William Mulvaney, George F. Stewart and Lauren Irby — will begin at 1:30 p.m. in City Council chambers at City Hall. The entity is a volunteer body that receives a minimum stipend, Mr. Anderson said.

As announced by Mr. Mulvaney following closure of the polls on Saturday, Mayor Genshaw topped challenger Pat A. Jones 412-189, while Councilman MacCoy outpolled challenger Stacie Whitt Spicer 400-199.

The vote total given was 717, including an announced 230 absentees. However, the actual absentee total was 115.

Mr. Anderson shed light on how the mistake occurred.

“At the election, the Board of Elections is charged with counting absentee ballots. We received 115 absentee ballots. The way our certificate of election is laid out, it gives the vote totals for each candidate, and it gives a total number of votes. Underneath total number of votes, there is, in parentheses, ‘including (BLANK) number of absentee ballots,” Mr. Anderson said.

“What the board did — it was a clerical error — they counted the votes (not the ballots).”

He added that, with four persons running for the two contested seats, each voter was allowed to cast two votes, one for mayor and one for council.

But the board members “took the total number of (absentee) votes, which was about 230, and they listed … that where it says, ‘Ballots.’ So the total number of votes, instead of the 717, should have been about 605 because they counted votes instead of ballots,” said Mr. Anderson.

City staff did not intervene in that; therefore, the error was not caught immediately, he said.

“It was caught (Monday),” he continued. “What we did on Monday was, we reached out to the board and said, ‘Hey, we have a discrepancy here. A clerical error was made, and we are going to reconvene the board.’ Next Monday, they are going to reconvene, review the certificate of election. It is anticipated they will make the correction, and then, we will republish the certificate of election to move forward, so that it is correct.”

As this is a public meeting, the agenda’s posting was required seven days in advance. The event will not be livestreamed, Mr. Anderson said.