Armed with the knowledge that 470 county residents voted in the wrong House of Delegates race in this month's primary, Kanawha County commissioners officially certified the county's primary election results on Wednesday.
Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick officially released the numbers after spending a week trying to figure out exactly how many voters were affected by the district mixup.
In all, 243 Democrats, 169 Republicans and 58 others who should have voted in the 35th District (which includes South Charleston, Dunbar, St. Albans and Charleston's South Hills neighborhoods) received ballots with the House races in the 36th District (which includes Charleston's West Side hill and much of southern and eastern Kanawha County).
All of these voters lived in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of Charleston, an area that's right on the edge of the city limits near Corridor G.
It's unlikely, but the votes from that one neighborhood could have changed the outcome of the election.
Democratic candidate Jack Rogers finished fifth in the race for the 35th District's four seats; he missed out on the fourth spot by 126 votes. Republican candidate Matt Kelly was 151 votes out of the fourth spot on the GOP side.
Now that the election has been certified, candidates have 10 days to contest the results, according to state law.
McCormick said she's met with Democratic candidates Andrew Byrd and Thornton Cooper about the issue, but both won by margins large enough not to be affected by the problem.
McCormick has not heard anything from Rogers or Kelly and neither were at Wednesday's meeting. Rogers could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
"Even if they did challenge it, what would we do?" Commission President Kent Carper asked several times in the meeting.
He said that a recount wouldn't make a difference, because the ballots are anonymous. The only solution would be to hold a special election.
"It's impossible to get this toothpaste back in the tube," Carper said.
The voting problem stems from precinct lines that Kanawha County drew in 2014 to accommodate Charleston redistricting their ward lines.
Charleston, which had no legal responsibility to respect delegate district lines, drew wards that crossed the delegate district boundaries.
The county clerk's office did not check to see if the ward and delegate district lines matched up before redrawing the precincts, which caused people to be placed in precincts that weren't in their delegate district.
McCormick said her office didn't have any idea that there was a problem until the day before early voting started, when Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, told her that there was a problem in his district.
"If we had any idea that the change went through that line, we would have been smart enough to know that can't happen," McCormick said.
McCormick's office was able to correct errors in three out of the four precincts that were affected during the early voting period. Only eight people voted in the wrong district from those areas.
But the clerk's office did not investigate the Sherwood forest neighborhood until after the election.
"If we knew something else was wrong, we would have done something about it," McCormick said.
McCormick was informed of an issue in the Sherwood Forest area as early as May 7, but decided that she wouldn't be able to take action until after the election.
McCormick said that she will fix the problem for November's general election by separating Sherwood Forest into two districts.
Reach Daniel Desrochers at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or follow @drdesrochers on Twitter.