Investigation needed in election programs

Editorial??? Reading Eagle?? 26 May 2005

The Issue: Because of errors in programming, 463 people in four city voting precincts will have to participate in a special election. Several races hang in the balance.

Our Opinion: Although no one is suggesting fraud, District Attorney Mark C. Baldwin should investigate the snafu and recommend how similar problems can be avoided.

With several primary election contests still undecided because of a mistake in the programming of some voting machines, it is time for the Berks County commissioners to answer a couple of questions.

Was this a direct result of the firing of V. Kurt Bellman?

How much is the programming glitch and the resulting special election going to cost the Berks County taxpayers?

Less than three weeks before the primary voting, the commissioners ? at least the two Democratic commis-sioners, Judith L. Schwank and Thomas W. Gajewski Sr. ? fired Bellman, elections director, for poor management.

Bellman, a Republican, claimed his dismissal was politically motivated. He said Schwank and Gajewski had a hit list that included many of the GOP-appointed officials working for the county.

Schwank and Gajewski dismissed the allegation, saying instead Bellman was behind in a lot of his work, including applying for state grants to upgrade elections equipment and train poll workers.

Whatever the motive behind the dismissal, subsequent events certainly suggest that the timing certainly wasn?t the best.

After Bellman was fired, Schwank and other election officials called in officials from Danaher Controls, a voting-machine software company from Gurnee, Ill., to com-plete the setup for the primary election.

When Danaher officials examined the work Bellman had done, they said the entire database for the election had to be rebuilt from scratch. It was four days before the election.

In the rush to get the work done, Danaher employees programmed 38 of the more than 380 data cartridges that record the votes as training cartridges, which reset voting totals to zero when the machines are opened.

We certainly are not questioning the analysis Danaher did of Bellman?s work, but during the four years Bellman was director of elections, no votes were lost.

We cannot help but wonder whether it would have been prudent to keep Bellman on the job until after the primary voting had been completed.

On election night, when the problems with the voting machines were coming to light, Schwank mused about how much worse things could have been had Bellman still been on the job.

The other side of that question is just as viable: Would this election have gone smoothly ? as had the others Bellman supervised ? had he not been fired.

Schwank has been asked how much this fiasco is going to cost the county, but all she said is that the expense will be negotiated. That is not good enough.

City Councilwoman Donna Reed, whose renomination in the 5th Council District remains in doubt because of the snafu, has called for an independent investigation into the programming glitch.

In light of some of the election irregularities that have taken place nationwide, Reed?s call for an independent investigation sounds like a good idea. And District Attorney Mark C. Baldwin would be an excellent person to conduct such an investigation.

Considering the complexity of the voting machines and their programming, it is somewhat surprising that these types of mistakes don?t occur more frequently. But when they do, it is important for the electorate to know that the error was inadvertent and not an attempt to tamper with the election.

We?re not suggesting that anyone attempted to do that, but an independent investigation would short-circuit any claims of impropriety that might arise and provide rec-ommendations to avoid a similar mistake.