Computer glitches slow EBR returns   (LA)

ADRIAN ANGELETTE   The Advocate    10 March 2008

Computer glitches created delays in reporting election returns for about 25 percent of the precincts in East Baton Rouge Parish, Secretary of State Jay Dardenne said Monday.

While most parishes had complete but unofficial election totals at or near 10 p.m. Saturday, East Baton Rouge Parish elections workers didn’t record their final results until about 12:15 a.m. Sunday.

Dardenne said Saturday’s election was the second one in which his office used a new system for recording votes.

Under the system, vote totals from the voting machines are loaded onto cartridges after polls close.

Poll commissioners then take the cartridges out of the machine and bring them to the Clerk of Court’s Office, where the cartridges are plugged into a laptop computer.

The laptop downloads the data from the cartridges and sends that information to a Secretary of State computer system.

Dardenne said there were two problems with the system Saturday.

One of the three laptop computers assigned to East Baton Rouge Parish was not accepting the data from the cartridges.

In addition, Dardenne said, election workers had to manually remove and log vote totals from some faulty cartridges.

“We had 75 percent of the returns in quickly,” Dardenne said. “It was the last 25 percent where there were problems feeding the returns to us.”

Dardenne said people have become accustomed to getting their returns more quickly in recent years, but glitches can cause delays. He said it’s more important to be accurate than quick when problems arise.

“There are always going to be issues that crop up,” he said.

Without those problems, all election returns would have been reported by about 10 p.m. Saturday, Dardenne said.

A spokesman for the East Baton Rouge Parish Clerk of Court’s Office said he was still meeting with elections officials from his office Monday afternoon. But, he said he’s been unable to locate any problems with the clerk’s office.

Spokesman Fred Sliman said there will be meetings involving his office and the Secretary of State’s Office to find solutions to problems that slow the reporting process.

“We’ll tear it down and improve it to the nth degree,” Sliman said.

The fact that East Baton Rouge Parish vote totals were much later than other parishes in an election with so few items on the ballot has created some concern that more problems could arise in much busier elections, such as those scheduled this fall.

Saturday’s ballot in East Baton Rouge Parish had only the congressional primaries, a Baker council runoff and four education propositions — one for Zachary and three for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system.

In the fall elections, ballots could have candidates in many more races, including president of the United States, mayor-president of East Baton Rouge Parish, Metro Council, East Baton Rouge district attorney, several judges and other more local elections, such as justices of the peace.

Jacques Berry, a spokesman for the Louisiana Secretary of State’s Office, said election totals in the fall could be the “highest we’ve ever seen.”

Berry said there are a large number of precincts in East Baton Rouge Parish and that results in some delay. He said there were 315 precincts to handle on Saturday in East Baton Rouge Parish while Orleans Parish had only 50.

Many of the commissioners who had arrived at the Clerk of Court’s Office on Coursey Boulevard to enter their cartridges into one of the three laptop computers had to wait until a laptop became available, he said.