The handling of provisional ballots filled Butler County's Bureau of Elections with lawyers Friday.

Challenges to who should and could handle those votes caused several delays in an ordinarily dry post-election meeting of a group called the computational board. At one point the throng of county workers and lawyers sat in a courtroom before Judge William Shaffer, who declined to get involved and turned them away to resume arguments in the elections office.

\It began around 9 a.m. when the computational board's meeting was scheduled to begin. Judicial candidate Jennifer Gilliland-Vanasdale and an attorney representing her, Sean Logue, attended and called for one of its members, Gail Paserba, to recuse herself from the board because of a comment she previously made on the Eagle's Facebook page.

In a post addressing the race for Court of Common Pleas judge, Paserba wrote “Remember there are great men and women in this race and we do not want to divide the votes and get this horrible woman into our court system.”

Vanasdale and Logue pointed to it as evidence of Paserba's bias and said she shouldn't be involved in the counting of ballots.

When all was done, a different board opened provisional ballots and read write-in votes, but those votes did not alter results from Tuesday's primary election and William Wink Robinson retained his win.

This is an excerpt. To read the entire story about how the day's events unfolded, make sure to pick up Sunday's Butler Eagle.