IN - Human error not to blame for vote-count fiasco in Monroe County

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March 29, 2002

Human error not to blame for vote-count fiasco in Monroe County

By Kurt Van der Dussen , Herald-Times Staff Writer A technical glitch — rather than human error by any election workers — is the reason that close to 400 Monroe County voters in two precincts lost their votes on Election Day of 2000.

The problem didn't alter the outcome of any races. But in a fascinating footnote to history, if the missing votes had been counted, there would have been a different No. 1 finisher among the three winners in the county council-at-large race.

Republican Jeff Ellington would have beaten Democrat Scott Wells by the same one-vote margin by which he forever will be officially recorded as finishing No. 2 behind Wells.

Two weeks ago, more than 16 months after the election, it came out that vote tallies from one county voting machine in Bloomington Township's 21st precinct at Meadowood Retirement Center and one at Perry Township's 9th precinct at Sherwood Oaks Christian Church hadn't been included in their precincts' vote totals.

In all, close to 400 people had voted on the two machines in question, but their votes were not recorded. And it's now long past the deadline for rectifying the county's vote totals to belatedly include those votes.

When the news first came out, the county's chief election official, Clerk Pat Haley, said she had no idea yet what happened.

Wednesday afternoon, the county election board and a small crowd of interested onlookers met in Haley's office with two officials from county voting machine vendor MicroVote.

By then, evidence had emerged that it was a technical, rather than human, problem.

"There is no problem whatever with the work anybody did," election board president Steve Hogan said at the start. "The question is whether there is a computer glitch."

A two-part test of the two machines ensued. It showed there indeed had been a malfunction, either by the software cartridges from the two voting machines or the computer that reads the cartridges and tallies their votes into the overall county vote totals.

When the cartridges were put in the voting machines, they successfully printed out paper tapes tallying the votes cast on that machine in each race.

But when the cartridges then were fed into the county election computer, they tallied zero votes.

One MicroVote official said it could be defective cartridges. But the other said no, the problem was with the computer, because the cartridge tallied results in the voting machine.

In reply, several people noted skeptically that the computer had no problem recording votes from the cartridges from a couple hundred other county voting machines on election night.

The MicroVote officials said the situation was unprecedented in their experience, and that there was no way to determine what caused the problem without further investigation. So the election board recessed its meeting until 5 p.m. Wednesday, when it will reconvene to learn the results.

The results are crucial, because nobody involved in county elections wants to see voters disfranchised by a machine again.

"They're as concerned as we are," Hogan said of the MicroVote officials. "They are in the business of producing voting machines."

Both Democratic county chairman Frank McCloskey and Republican county chairwoman Robin Vuke used the same word — "absolutely" — to stress they want a fix to the problem rather than find a scapegoat to blame.

One onlooker, Monroe County Taxpayer Association president Jim Billingsley, said "it's a nonpartisan problem and there ought to be a nonpartisan solution."

Hogan said county election officials will be taking extra precautions on primary night, May 7. He said they'll select one "key race" and manually check every machine's totals to see that they have been tallied. If that race tallies, it's logical to assume the machine tallied other totals from other races as well.

Hogan also went out of his way to make sure that precinct workers knew they hadn't done anything on that election night to cost people their votes.

"There is no problem with anything you folks did," Hogan told three women in attendance who had been precinct officials at Bloomington 21.

"We just want to know what happened," said Bloomington 21 precinct inspector Dolores Counts. She said later she had trouble sleeping the night after news of the lost votes came out.

Fortunately, counting the missing votes wouldn't have altered who was elected to any of the positions on the ballot.

In the county council at-large contest, Ellington and Wells would have swapped sides on their one-vote margin, but both would still have been elected.

Wells finished first by one vote in the official count. Votes from the uncounted machines favored Wells by 22 votes in Democratic Bloomington 21 and Ellington by 24 votes in Republican Perry 9. Result: Ellington would have topped Wells by one vote overall.

Republican Doug Duncan still would have finished third in the race, winning the last seat in a contest where each voter could vote for three candidates.

Fourth-place Randy May was 25 votes behind Duncan in the official tally and would have gained only six votes to finish 19 behind Duncan.

Overall, May would have finished 45 votes behind Ellington and 44 behind Wells, instead of the 61 votes he finished behind Wells in the official count.

Ellington was glad to see the totals in the council race from the two machines finally come out. For public confidence in the outcome, he said, "It's important that the citizens see those numbers, whether it's past the election or not" and even if they don't count.

Wells took his unofficial first-place swap with Ellington good-naturedly. "Sure, it matters! It means you've got to get out and vote!" he said — though the irony was that close to 400 county residents who did vote weren't counted.

"It's imperative that this never happen again," Ellington said, a view offered by many at Wednesday's meeting.

http://www.hoosiertimes.com/stories/2002/03/29/news.020329_HT_D1_JPS37295.sto?PREVURI=%2Fstories%2F2002%2F03%2F29%2Findex

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2002

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Hey, double posting just like the old times :-§

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2002

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