Few election problems reported
Worker's Jeep, containing ballots, was stolen Monday night

By ERICA BLAKE
Toledo?BLADE??? 05 May 2005
Thousands of paper ballots may have slowed up tabulating the results of special elections in Lucas County Tuesday, but the money saved on renting electronic machines was worth the time, elections officials insisted yesterday.

And to be fair, said Board of Elections director Jill Kelly, it did not take Florida time to calculate the results.

Unofficial results for all six Lucas County special elections were accepted by the county's Board of Elections members at 12:35 a.m. yesterday. Although that was significantly later than for all other counties in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan, Ms. Kelly said it is not that unusual to run into some snags on Election Day.

Those snags included a Sylvania precinct official who brought ballot boxes to the county election board's office in Government Center without having counted the votes.

"We trained and trained and trained. I don't have an explanation, but believe me I'm going to find out," Ms. Kelly said.

Elections workers are paid between $95 and $105 for the day, depending on their responsibilities.

Adding to election officials' grief was the sudden need to print about 800 additional ballots Monday night after an election employee's Jeep was stolen. Inside, according to election officials, were ballots, signature books, and clerk's books for two precincts voting on the Toledo Public Schools levy.

Michael Badik, deputy director of the county Board of Elections, said that the reprinted ballots were given serial numbers not already used during this election in order to spot fraud if someone attempted to cast them.

Because of a low number of ballots cast across the county, Mr. Badik said it was unlikely that any of the stolen ballots were used. But, the serial numbers of all ballots will be scrutinized during the final, official count to make sure none of the stolen ballots was cast, he said.

Asked about the cost of printing new books and ballots, Mr. Badik said the board has not yet received a bill for the last-minute service.

Although all ballots and precincts were ready Tuesday, delays did occur in the unofficial vote counts. Election officials initially expected to report results around 9 p.m. because of the light turnout, which was only 13 percent in Toledo Public Schools precincts, but that timetable was pushed back several times throughout the night.

According to Ms. Kelly, that is a simple result of having to count paper ballots by hand. The board of elections will be meeting today to possibly a permanent voting system, Ms. Kelly said. But until the county acquires its own voting machines and has them in place, there are only two options: rent machines or count paper ballots.

To rent machines and special-order ballots usable in scanning machines would have cost the county a total of more than $400,000, Ms. Kelly said.

"The only way this [delay] might happen again is if we had a special election in August," Ms. Kelly said. The county expects to purchase new voting machines in time for the November general election.

Gary Johnson, who was sworn in Sunday to the board of elections, said yesterday that the low turnout expected for the election justified the use of paper ballots. In the Toledo Public School District, where there are 159,840 registered voters, only 20,932 voters or 13 percent cast ballots. Of those, 4,140 votes were cast via absentee ballot.

Similarly, only 24 percent of Maumee's 13,586 registered voters cast ballots Tuesday and about 27 percent of the 33,335 registered voters in Sylvania city and township voted on the two fire district and one senior citizen center levy.

Mr. Johnson said the recent investigation of the board of elections by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's office that led to the resignation of three of its four members and an "administrative watch" over the board meant officials were more interested in doing things right than quickly.

"The board has been plagued with procedural mistakes that got them oversight by the state," he said. "We decided to take our time and make sure everything was right."

In fact, Ms. Kelly initially enforced Tuesday an April 28 directive from Mr. Blackwell's office that indicated it was illegal under the Ohio Revised Code for news media to have access to polling locations. Photographers for The Blade, who have for decades routinely taken from a distance pictures of people voting inside polling places as part of election coverage, were suddenly denied access as a result.

The Blade, through its attorney, Fritz Byers, cited a federal court decision last November when Mr. Blackwell's office attempted to execute a similar directive during the presidential election.

The judge ruled in favor of The Akron Beacon Journal and other media, indicating that refusing access to the polls represented a violation of the media's news-gathering rights under the First Amendment.

After consulting with the county prosecutor's office, Ms. Kelly reversed her position and withdrew the ban on media access.