Canvassing safeguards trigger discovery of 2,675 uncounted ballots in two Idaho counties
Routine post-election canvas procedures across Idaho have uncovered 2,675 uncounted or unreported ballots that were accidentally omitted from the state's unofficial election night totals, prompting an immediate full recount in one county and swift corrective updates in another, state and local election officials announced.
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane affirmed Wednesday that built-in reconciliation checks successfully caught the discrepancies before official county or state canvassing boards certified final results. Crucially, election officials confirmed that the integration of the overlooked ballots has not altered the outcome or victor of any federal, statewide, legislative, or judicial contest.
“This is precisely why we have the post-election canvas process,” Secretary McGrane said in a public statement. “Our systems are designed with multiple independent layers of cross-checks to catch human errors and data-transfer gaps. Every legally cast ballot in Idaho will be counted accurately and transparently.”
How technical USB transfer failures and precinct omissions left votes off the board
The vast majority of the missing ballots originated in northern Idaho's Latah County, home to the University of Idaho in Moscow. During the pre-canvas reconciliation on Friday, Latah County Clerk Julie Fry and election auditors cross-referenced voter check-in rosters against machine tabulations and discovered a 2,342-vote discrepancy in early in-person voting.
Investigators determined that while the 2,342 early ballots had been physically scanned and counted through digital optical tabulation machines, the data results file stored on a secure USB flash drive failed to upload properly to the state’s centralized reporting server on election night, leaving those votes entirely excluded from the public tally.
In a separate, unrelated development in eastern Idaho, Bannock County election officials identified 333 Election Day paper ballots from the Pocatello 2 precinct that had been received at the central counting office but inadvertently placed in a secure holding bin without being fed into the high-speed tabulator. The uncounted batch was discovered during routine precinct-by-precinct inventory before the Bannock County Board of Canvassers convened.
Bannock County Clerk officials promptly processed the 333 ballots in the presence of bipartisan observers, uploaded the updated results to the secretary of state's database, and verified that all precinct totals aligned with polling book registers.
Recount ordered in Latah County as Secretary McGrane affirms outcomes are intact
To eliminate any doubt and ensure complete public confidence in Latah County, Secretary of State McGrane, in coordination with Clerk Fry, ordered a complete, hand-vetted recount of all ballots cast within the county. State election staff were dispatched to Moscow to oversee the re-tabulation alongside county election workers.
Preliminary re-tabulation confirmed that while the newly added votes narrowed margins in several contested local municipal and legislative races, the leads held by winning candidates were sufficiently wide to withstand the shift. In Legislative District 6, which covers Latah County, incumbents maintained their seats with leads exceeding the newly recorded totals.
“Human oversights occur, but our rigorous paper-ballot trail ensures that errors are detected and corrected before anything is made final,” McGrane added. The Idaho State Board of Canvassers is scheduled to meet in Boise later this month to review all county canvassing certificates and formally ratify the certified 2026 general election results.
