VotersUnite!

Faced on Tuesday with one of its most anticipated and acrimonious primary elections in recent memory, some Lucas County Board of Elections officials said they fear the possibility of chaos at the polls and in the election’s aftermath.

"I see potential for fireworks, confrontations at the polls between factions," said Joseph Kidd, the elections board’s executive director. "I suspect our office will be inundated with calls and complaints."

Bernadette Noe, an elections board member who also is the local Republican Party chairman, has similar concerns.

"I am nervous about Tuesday," she said. "The stakes are very high. You’re dealing with write-in votes, the polls are understaffed, many poll workers have been newly trained, and it’s been a zealous campaign."

A group of Democrats opposed to Paula Ross, elections board chairman, is trying to unseat her as the local Democratic Party chairman. As a result, 697 candidates are vying for committeeman positions in 191 contested races in the county’s 495 precincts.

Should the group gain the majority of the precincts, its organizers have said they will vote Ms. Ross out of office when she comes up for re-election as party chairman this spring.

Anti-Ross group officials and Ms. Ross said any thought of polling-booth shenanigans by either group is speculative.

"We don’t anticipate any problems between anybody," said Dennis Duffey, of the anti-Ross Coalition of Concerned Democrats.

Said Ms. Ross: "I’m confident that any of our precinct candidates who choose to go to the polls will behave."

Mr. Kidd said his office has recruited about 2,000 poll workers who have received extensive training. Also, 25 inspectors and 25 technicians will visit the precincts to monitor activities and troubleshoot any problems.

Still, concerns remain.

Mr. Kidd and others concede that an unspecified number of poll workers won’t show up on Election Day.

Ms. Noe said at most precincts it will be difficult to have more than one Republican poll worker present because their numbers are fewer than the Democrats. Yet, by law, each precinct is supposed to be manned by two Republicans and two Democrats.

Since the poll workers will be responsible for retrieving write-in votes from the precincts, a high number of which are expected, Ms. Noe said she is concerned about the integrity of the vote should there not be balanced representation among the poll workers.

"I don’t care how the [Demo- cratic] races come out, but I do care that it’s fair," she said.

Said Mr. Kidd: "The whole system depends on having equal representation of both parties to make sure it’s fair. We are making great efforts in that regard. Everyone will do their best to mitigate any problems and keep them at a minimum. As long as no one expects a flawless election, no one should be disappointed. Every election has some problems."

Meanwhile, the company supplying the optical-scan voting machines for the primary has said it will pay for the reprinting of about 150,000 Election Day ballots after mistakes were found on ballots for 14 precincts.

Elections board officials said the mistake stemmed from an error in the database supplied by Diebold Election Systems, Inc., of McKinney, Texas. But Mickey Martin, Diebold’s northeast sales manager, said the error occurred after an elections board supervisor input the wrong information. Mr. Martin said the error should have been caught by elections board or Diebold employees.

"All the reviews, including the one I did, failed to catch [it]," he said.

Mr. Kidd said though only a small number of ballots were affected by the errors, all the ballots had to be reprinted. "We had to create a new database to correct [them]," he said.