Misread ballots force election hand-count
Zsombor Peter 
Gallup Independent   08 March 2007

GALLUP — Talk about lost in translation.

City officials are blaming an error in Tuesday's elections that may have affected the outcome of at least one race and a minimum wage proposal on a ballot question that was improperly translated to Spanish. Starting this morning, they'll be recounting some of the ballots by hand to find the votes the machines missed.

According to City Clerk Patricia Holland, Question 1, which proposed raising the local minimum wage to $7.50 an hour, did not include the dollar figure in its Spanish version. The city caught the problem before Tuesday, and ordered new ballots. But no one realized that the change had shifted the position of the ovals people were required to fill in to vote for or against the question. And because the machines the city was using to scan the ballots weren't reprogrammed to detect the new position of the ovals, they weren't counted.

City Attorney George Kozeliski said the change in Question 1 also shifted the ovals in the race for municipal judge, between incumbent Linda Padilla and challenger Anthony Dimas. According to Tuesday's unofficial count, Padilla received 1,702 votes to Dimas' 1,507. But because of the shift, Kozeliski said, some of the votes for Padilla could have been counted for Dimas and vice versa.

Complicating the matter is the fact that some early and absentee voters along with a few of the people who voted at Indian Hills Elementary filled out the ballots with the translating error while others filled out the new ones. And the city has no other way of separating them but manually.

So, starting this morning at 8:30, inside the City Council Chambers, poll workers will be recounting all early, absentee and District 2 ballots by hand.

Because none of the ballots with the translating error made it to the other three districts, the city thinks it can reprogram the scanning machines to read all the ovals correctly this time. If the numbers for all the other races and ballot questions match up with the numbers posted Tuesday, Kozeliski said, they'll know they weren't affected. If they don't, he said, they'll probably end up recounting all those ballots by hand as well.

"All we can do is assure people that whoever gets the most votes is going to win," he said, "and if we have to sit here all weekend and hand-count (the ballots), we're going to hand-count them."

Dimas, who stands to gain a judgeship depending on how the recount goes, said all the ballots should be hand-counted from the start. Kozeliski said that will be up to the election's canvassing board.

Mayoral candidate Ralph Richards, who is still hanging in the race since it's still not clear if front-runner Harry Mendoza has enough votes to avoid a runoff, wondered if it wasn't time for the city to throw out the result entirely.

"At what point do you call an election invalid?" he asked.

Holland said that option wasn't even on the table. While the machines may have failed to scan the ballots correctly, the ballots themselves were filled out properly and never compromised. At worst, she said, they'd all be recounted by hand.

Meanwhile, the races for mayor and District 2 councilor also remain undecided because of a few outstanding provisional ballots, the ballots voters get to fill out if they don't show up on a polling station's registry. If the city can prove they should have been registered, or were registered somewhere else, the ballots counts. If it can't, they're thrown out. Holland said there were between five and eight such ballots in this election. They'll be counted when the city does its hand-counting of the other ballots.

As it turns out, that's plenty to swing either race. Based on the ballots counted so far, Mendoza fell just one vote short of winning 40 percent of the total votes cast and avoiding a runoff for mayor against Richards, who finished second. In District 2, Roger Landovazo avoided a runoff against Barbara Stanley by just six votes. The provisional ballots could potentially change all that.

The results will be final no later than Monday afternoon. The city has to have its official numbers in to the state by 5 p.m., even if it means working through the weekend.