Gaston election inquiry begins

Director Page has few answers for state lawyer on voting discrepancies

BINYAMIN APPELBAUM   Charlotte Observer   23 November 2004

GASTONIA - Five times Monday the lawyer from the state Board of Elections asked Gaston Elections Director Sandra Page what had gone wrong once for each of Gaston County's major election problems.

Five times Page had no answers.

"I thoroughly don't know about that," she said when asked why more than 13,000 votes were omitted from the county's unofficial election results.

"I didn't know that it was my responsibility," she said when asked why not.

And when the lawyer asked who else could possibly have been responsible, Page replied, "I did not know that I was responsible for counting votes."

The frustrated questioner, Don Wright, the general counsel of the state board, reported back to Raleigh by telephone that his four-person team would have to find its own answers.

So began the investigation into all that went wrong with the Nov. 2 election in Gaston County.

"The results of what you see today speak to management problems as clearly as anything could," Wright said at day's end, after several more hours spent wading through documents and asking questions for which answers were rarely available.

Earlier, commenting on Gaston's failure to check the number of ballots cast against the number of people recorded as voting, Wright said, "There is no excuse for what I've seen."

Wright said he hoped to issue preliminary findings today, though some parts of the investigation are only beginning. In particular, Wright ordered the Gaston elections office to demand explanations from officials in nine precincts who reported a difference between the number of ballots cast and the number of people recorded as voting.

And he ordered an investigation into a report that poll workers at a Cherryville precinct unwittingly gave a second voting card to a man who had already voted. It would be the first documented instance of illegal voting to emerge from the failure to record the name of every voter.

The state is investigating five separate problems with the way the Gaston elections office conducted, counted and reported the Nov. 2 election. The problems did not affect the result of any race, but some state laws may have been violated. And it is still not clear whether every ballot cast was counted.

? A majority of the county's precincts reported a difference between the number of ballots cast and the number of people recorded as voting. The state is investigating why Gaston County submitted official results without resolving the disparities. It is also investigating the cause of the disparities.

? Gaston's recount of votes in two statewide races produced about 75 more votes than the county's initial results. The difference was the number of votes culled from about 750 optical scan ballots cast curbside by voters who could not walk into a precinct. The state is investigating the disparity.

? The Gaston elections office paid at least three employees of private companies to work as troubleshooters. One was a technician from Diebold Election Systems, which manufactures the machines used in Gaston. The state is investigating what role they played on Election Day and whether they were properly supervised by elections officials.

? More than 13,000 votes were omitted from the county's unofficial results. About 1,200 votes from a Dallas precinct were not counted until Nov. 8. About 12,000 early votes were not counted until Nov. 9. The state is investigating how the votes were omitted and why the error was not caught sooner.

? Some ballots cast during early voting were not set up properly by poll workers. As a result, they could not have been retrieved from the voting machine if a ballot was challenged. The state is investigating the extent and cause of the problem.

Wright spent Monday afternoon working through the county's failure to make sure the number of ballots cast was the same as the number of people who voted. That crosscheck is a part of the audit process each county is required to complete before submitting official results.

Gaston officials said they had balanced seven additional precincts since the Observer reported last week that 29 of the county's 46 precincts had reported differences.

But even this second effort proved to be wrong in at least one case. Ashbrook High School still had six more people recorded as voting than the number of ballots cast.

Wright found that a total of 23 precincts remain unbalanced. Six of those precincts reported a total of 10 more ballots than people recorded as voting. Seventeen of those precincts reported a total of 58 more people voting than the number of ballots recorded.

The Gaston staff has received some explanations for the discrepancies, such as people who left the line before voting, from 14 precincts. Poll workers from the remaining nine precincts will have two days to respond to a letter from the elections office.

Page has said that the problems with the precinct reports are the fault of precinct officials who failed to follow instructions.

She watched only a small part of the review Monday. When Wright completed his work, he called Page into the room and requested the precinct reports from the 2000 election.

These proved to be even less complete and even more problematic than the error-ridden batch from 2004.

"I'm disappointed in the whole thing," Wright told Page. "If the majority of people didn't listen to you in 2000, and they aren't listening to you now ..."

He let the sentence end there.