Recount stirs voting angst: Voters now wary of reliability of new electronic machines

By PAUL A. ANTHONY, panthony@sastandardtimes.com or 659-8237
San Angelo Standard Times. April 3, 2006

The problems started with a bang - three of them, actually, in quick succession.

Power in the Tom Green County Elections Office blacked out, recovered briefly, then died again with an office full of voters casting ballots on the last day of early voting.
 
Perhaps it was a harbinger, but the March 3 explosion of a transformer across the street from the Judge Edd B. Keyes Building soon proved to be the least of the concerns surrounding the March 7 Republican primary.

Election night problems and a recount that was suspended for three days have not only left candidates and election officials scrambling to be ready for the April 11 runoff, they have caused observers and experts to question whether changes should be made in the way Tom Green County runs its elections - and its elections office.

''The one fundamental political job counties have to do is an election,'' said Ed Olson, head of the Angelo State University government department. ''We don't have a record of doing a good job with that.''

Benton has said he expects the April 11 runoff - which features races for County Court-at-Law No. 2, District 72 state representative and Precinct 2 county commissioner - to run much smoother, in part because election workers will have more experience with the computerized machines.

''This is stuff that we've worked out, and we are changing it,'' Benton said.

The transformer explosions rocked downtown San Angelo, but their effect on the voting taking place some thousand feet away turned out to be minimal.

As lights blacked out on the second floor of the Keyes Building, voter Desta Crooks used the light from her cell phone to finish filling out her ballot on a computerized voting machine, which was backed up with batteries.

Elections officials have said ballots cast electronically during the power outage were recorded. Still, Crooks said, she wonders - especially when a recount of votes cast in the County Court-at-Law No. 2 race was suspended amid reports of thousand-vote discrepancies in early voting totals.

''I'm very thankful it was not a presidential election and only on the county level,'' Crooks said. ''I don't want Tom Green County to become the next Florida.''

A close race

Nevertheless, the suspension of the recount - midway through its second day March 21 - received national attention, particularly from Internet writers eager to find fault with electronic voting systems.

The court-at-law race was a three-way battle between incumbent Judge Penny Roberts and two prosecutors who argued cases in her courtroom - Dan Edwards, who resigned as head of the county's Domestic Violence Prosecution Unit to run for the position, and Assistant County Attorney Julie Hughes.

A bevy of Election Night problems led to massive delays in reporting vote totals. When final results were released about 1 a.m. March 8, Edwards was 13 votes behind Roberts for a spot in the runoff election.

The next day, election workers found 68 votes that had not been counted March 7. As a result, Edwards' deficit was narrowed to 12, where it stayed.

Although he initially rejected the idea of a recount - comparing voters to jurors when discussing the finality of their decision - Edwards changed his mind after learning of the additional votes.

''I'm just not sure they got it right on Election Night,'' the former prosecutor said.

Little over the next week would reassure him.

The recount began March 20 and stretched long into the night as recount workers discovered the machines - designed to print out paper ballots in the event of a hand recount - had only printed about 8,100 ballots, well short of the 9,600 counted on Election Night.

By the next afternoon, the Texas Secretary of State's Office suggested county Republican Party Chairman Dennis McKerley suspend the recount until a technician with Hart InterCivics, the vendor of the new electronic voting machines, could arrive and assess the problem.

The problems were many, Hart said, and they all were the result of human error.

In particular, election workers discovered a voting machine that had been improperly used both for early voting and at a polling place. Recount workers printed off its Election Day totals, not realizing it also contained early ballots.

Data on 10 machines were improperly backed up after the polls closed Election Day. Because recount ballots are printed from the backups, a Hart spokesman said, the procedural error caused fewer ballots to be printed.

The Hart technician took less than an hour to find and fix the problems, McKerley said, and was on hand March 25 for the restart of the recount, which found Edwards to have lost by 15 votes.

Earlier problems

The turmoil might not have been close to Florida's, when recounts and court battles delayed the results of the 2000 presidential election for a month - but it was bad enough, said Rebecca Johnson, a polling judge who has worked elections in Tom Green County for 50 years.

She saved her strongest remarks for first-year Elections Administrator Mike Benton.

''This new man doesn't know what he's doing, and it shows,'' Johnson said. ''This is the worst thing I've ever seen in the elections office.''

This isn't the only example of significant problems in the elections office, said Olson, the ASU government head who has been following elections in Tom Green County since 1978.

In 1984 and 1988, races for state representative were thrown into limbo when counting errors took place, and ballots were brought to the wrong locations, Olson said.

In 2004, reporting problems on Election Night led to a lawsuit in state district court to overturn the results of the Precinct 1 county commissioner's race. A judge declined to do so, although he ruled the elections office had made several errors.

''We have chronically had problems on Election Day and Election Night,'' Olson said, adding that he remembers just two or three elections where the county has not had problems. ''Human error has caused more troubles here than for lots of towns.''

The question for elections officials remains how to keep it from causing trouble in the next election - a mere nine days away.

Benton said his office will make sure its employees and volunteers are completely familiar with the machines and the procedures for retrieving and counting votes.

Although many have criticized the elections office's performance in the days surrounding the election, Benton's job is safe for now, said County Judge Mike Brown, who heads the commissioner's court that oversees the elections office.

Nevertheless, he said, several problems were preventable - including starting a logic-and- accuracy test on the machines more than 30 minutes after the polls closed when it could have been done at any time during the day.

Brown acknowledged that April 11 will be a test, calling it a ''big problem'' if it becomes another March 7.

''I have asked the elections administrator to make sure that any and all tasks that can be completed before 7 o'clock be done before 7,'' Brown said. ''I don't see replacing anybody. The change will probably be in the way the personnel are utilized and managed. ... The atmosphere was a little too relaxed.''