Snarled by write-ins
   

Thursday, April 21, 2005

By ROBERT RATISH  NorthJersey.com
PEQUANNOCK - Results of the school board election remained up in the air Wednesday as township officials counted and double-checked a flood of ballots that came in for an unusually large field of write-in candidates.

Officials expected to continue counting ballots deep into Wednesday night.
 

Meanwhile, they released computer tallies for three formally listed candidates on the ballot for the three three-year board seats.

The large number of write-in candidates caused confusion at the polls, long lines at election sites, and delays at Town Hall, where employees manually counted more than 2,000 write-in votes. Township Clerk Dolores Sweeney said her office began counting the votes Tuesday night, staying until almost 2 a.m. She planned to continue counting Wednesday and expected to have final results today.

Sweeney said Wednesday that she would not release the results of the initial write-in vote count until the numbers could be rechecked.

While write-in votes had to be counted by hand, computerized tallies for the listed candidates gave incumbent William Slater 683 votes and newcomers Patricia Bennett and Christopher Lotito 503 and 165 votes, respectively.

Write-in candidates Thomas Jelleme, Jeannette Andreula, Maureen Daly and Jacquie Stivala, and incumbent Barbara Cook, awaited results of the manual count.

Voters also approved the 2005-06 school budget's $25 million tax levy, 793-413. Approval means a school tax increase of $130 on a home assessed at the township average of $184,000.

Of the 9,558 registered voters, 1,501, or 16 percent, turned out to vote. Among the ballots cast, 63 percent went to write-in votes.

Voters surveyed cited several reasons for turning out to the polls. Some were concerned about the state of the schools. Some said they were bothered by reports in the weekly Suburban Trends newspaper that Lotito, 21, was arrested for making threats to Pequannock High School when he was a student there in 2000. Lotito has refused to comment on the allegations.

Suburban Trends is published by the North Jersey Media Group, the parent corporation of The Record.

The unusual volume of write-in voting caused uncertainty at the polling sites.

"On the line, everybody was talking. 'What do we do, what do we do?'?" said Nancy Gross, who witnessed the confusion at North Boulevard School. She said some people believed three write-in votes could be entered together on the same line.

However, write-in votes must be entered one at a time on the electronic ballot machines. A voter must first press a button that says "write-in" and then type in the name on the machine's keyboard.

Sweeney said votes with multiple names on one line would not count.

"If they put three people on one line, that has to be thrown away," she said. Sweeney also said she heard that some people mistakenly pushed the "cast vote" button after entering a write-in vote, giving up their chance to vote for other candidates.

Sweeney said she did not hear of poll workers giving out incorrect information, but conceded that casting write-in votes could be confusing.

"It was tricky. It is overwhelming when you're doing it for the first time," she said.

Some voters also cast multiple write-in votes for the same candidate. The voting machines guard against this by assigning an alphabetical code to each voter. If a person writes in the same name more than once, those votes will show the same alphabetical code, signaling to election officials that the vote should only count once.

Long lines contributed to a delay in getting the ballots, Sweeney said.

"The polls close at 9, and usually by 9:30 I have all the people back from the polling districts. There was such a long line at North Boulevard, and once people are in line you can't |turn them away. They didn't come to my office until around 10:30 p.m.," she said. That delay meant a long night at the Morris County Clerk's Office.

"Initially, I have to admit I was kind of annoyed," said Larry Brown of the County Clerk's Office. "I thought we'd be done by 11:15."

When the courier from Pequannock had not delivered the voting machine records, the clerk's office called the township. And when nobody picked up the phone, Brown became worried.

"I called the police dispatcher to say, 'Can you please send someone over to the clerk?'?" he said.

Brown became concerned that the courier might have been in an accident on the way to Morristown, but a few minutes later the courier arrived.

"It went from frustration, to concern, to sheer delight that everything was done," Brown said.