Elections officials in the City of St. Louis will count the ballots in the Democratic primary for sheriff a second time.
St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Joseph Whyte authorized a recount to be completed Tuesday afternoon. Incumbent Vernon Betts lost to Alfred Montgomery, a former sheriff’s deputy, by 256 votes out of more than 45,000 cast. That is within the 1% threshold needed under state law for recounts in local races.
The Board of Election Commissioners will rescan the ballots cast, said elections law expert Chuck Hatfield. There will be some ballots the machine will mark as unreadable. Unlike on election night, however, representatives of the candidates can inspect those ballots and determine whether a vote can be cast.
Under state law, the city pays for the recount. Officials say it could cost $10,000.
The last recount in St. Louis came in a 2020 race for Democratic committeewoman of the old 2nd Ward. While the margins changed slightly, the result did not – Erma Jefferson beat Joyce Hall by 11 votes.
The St. Louis sheriff’s race is not the only one to feature a recount. In Barry County, in far southwest Missouri, a primary challenger to incumbent Republican Danny Boyd asked for one after initial results showed him losing by 48 votes. While hand and machine recounts resulted in different margins, Boyd remained the victor in both cases.
Recounts rarely change the results of elections, said David Kimball, a professor of political science at University of Missouri–St. Louis.
“The methods we have for counting our votes the first time are very reliable,” he said. “And there usually aren’t many ballots to reasonably dispute.”
Simple math also works against a candidate hoping to change the results, said Chris Duncan, a political science professor at St. Louis University.
“When you do the recount, it’s not just the person who’s asked for the recount who is getting more votes, the other person is getting more votes at the same time,” Duncan said. “For you to overtake the person, you’ve got to get two votes for every one in the recount.”
A 2023 report by FairVote, a nonpartisan group that advocates for ranked choice voting, found that of nearly 7,000 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2023, there were 36 statewide recounts. Just three of those caused a reversal in the results. In all of those cases, the initial margin was less than 0.06% of votes cast.
But despite the high odds, Duncan said, ongoing false narratives about election integrity may prompt more candidates to seek recounts where allowed.
“I think the culture has shifted to some extent, and the conversations about whether elections are free and fair in this country has really made it more likely that people are going to challenge the race and be unwilling sometimes to concede,” he said.
Almost every state has some mechanism for a recount, according to FairVote. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have automatic recounts if a result is within a certain margin. The other 27, including Missouri and Illinois, require a losing candidate to ask for a recount. Mississippi is the lone state without a provision for recounts.
