Secretary Warner: Primary Voting Went ‘Very, Very Smoothly’ 

More than 2,700 candidates were on the statewide ballots for Tuesday’s primary election. For his first election as Secretary of State, Kris Warner joined more than 230 staff members and investigators stationed across West Virginia to observe polling precincts and respond to any concerns.  

As results were coming in Tuesday evening he spoke with Maria Young about what went well – and the handful of things that did not.  

Here is a transcript of that conversation. 

This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Maria: What do you know about turnout today?  

Warner: So far we don’t have any numbers yet on turnout that will be able to tell us how we’ve done over the 2022, non-presidential primary election. But, just anecdotally, I will tell you in Kanawha County, Vera McCormick has said that she had to send additional paper ballots out to some precincts because there were so many people voting. And they’ve been at it for a long time. They know how many people are likely to show up.  

And then we had other places. You know, midday in Cabell County, only 22 people had shown up at a precinct. So I think it really is a matter of where in the state, whether there were hotly contested races. 

Maria: Were there any problems? 

Warner: We fielded 196 calls. Those are reports from the field. I would tell you, a majority of those just dealt with human error. Voters going to the wrong precinct. Someone who didn’t update their name or address if they got married since the last election and the name changed and it didn’t match what was in the book.  

We had a couple of situations where the marking machines that used to mark the ballots ran out of battery life. They might not have been completely plugged in, and they were beeping at the poll workers. We had one that got a paper jam, but every one of those calls has already been handled. 

The one area that I would tell you – there were probably less than five calls – but something that we were watching very closely was those that were frustrated. They were registered unaffiliated, and they wanted to vote in the Republican primary. In three counties there were some reports of people that just left frustrated, upset that they didn’t get to vote a Republican ballot.  

The other area that we were really watching was the photo ID law that was passed in the 2025 legislative session. And we did not have one report anywhere in this state of anyone that was not able to vote because of the photo ID law. That was encouraging on those two fronts. Those were two areas that we were keeping a very close watch on.  

The canvassing starts on Monday. The earliest anyone would have official results in West Virginia would be Wednesday, because there’s a 48-hour period once the official results have been released, to determine if there’s going to be a recount or a challenge in any of those races. 

Maria: Okay, anything else you’d like to add? 

Warner: This is my first election as Secretary of State. Just really pleased with what I heard. A couple of cases where the older poll workers told me that they literally cheered when it was known that certain voters were first-time voters. So they could recognize the high school seniors that were coming in.  

We heard that in a couple different places. So just very rewarding that the older folks recognize the first-time voters. And one of the precincts in Putnam County, we had two, not only first-time voters, but first-time poll workers, checking everyone in.  

And I think that’s great. Anytime somebody can see somebody of their own age group working the polls, somebody that they know, all of a sudden this is not a federal election where people working for the federal government are working our polls. These are people in their own precincts.  

Big shout out, not only to the 55 county clerks, but the 8,000 poll workers. I thought it was just a phenomenal day in an election that went very, very smoothly.