“Protest votes” and other rejected ballots from Tuesday’s election will be fully counted at a later date, the Parliamentary Registrar said yesterday.

Tenia Woolridge addressed the ballot counting process after voters expressed concerns that ballots reflecting their displeasure with the candidate selection were not shared on the Parliament Registry website.

She said that rejected ballots were often considered a lower priority after the election, with the voting team’s focus being on the “proper organisation and secure storage of all election materials, as required by law for a one-year retention period”.

However, Ms Woolridge assured the public that these rejected votes, although still being counted, would not change the results.

Ms Woolridge also clarified the difference between a spoilt ballot and a rejected one.

She explained that, for a ballot to be listed as spoilt, a mistake or confusion with the ballot must be brought to the attention of polling station operators first.

These submissions never reach the ballot box and are not counted as votes.

Rejected ballots will reach the ballot box and include submissions that are unclear in their opinion, such as selecting more than one candidate, or state that a voter was unsatisfied with the constituency’s candidates.

Ms Woolridge said that, while some were published online, these ballots were not always counted in full immediately after the vote.

She added that these numbers were not published online in full until they had been properly sorted to avoid confusion or misinformation.

Ms Woolridge explained: “At the end of the night, each polling station produces a reconciliation summary sheet.

“This document is used to verify the ballots issued, counted, unused and includes the numbers of both spoilt and rejected ballots.

“To ensure accuracy, we will need to review all 36 reconciliation forms before publishing the final numbers on the website.”

Ms Woolridge could not give a time frame for how long it would take to sort through all the rejected ballots.

At the time of publication, the Parliamentary Registry website has listed 60 rejected ballots and 52 spoilt ones.

Smith’s South (Constituency 8) has the most rejected ballots, listed at ten, while Sandys North Central (Constituency 35) had the most spoilt ballots, numbering 11.

In Smith’s South, Ben Smith, of the One Bermuda Alliance, won with 605 votes against the Progressive Labour Party’s Lauren Bell with 195 votes.

Dennis Lister held Sandys North Central with 346 votes, succeeding against OBA candidate Rodrae Durrant, who won 101 votes; independent candidate Christopher Bean, who won 168 votes; and independent candidate Eugene Brangman, who won five votes.

The election ultimately had a total vote count of 24,779 out of 45,064 registered voters — a turnout of 54.99 per cent.