Do primary day glitches foretell an Election Day mess?  (RI)

Cynthia Needham    Providence Journal    23 September 2008

It was hard to tell where exactly the glitches began on primary election day.

First a ballot pack got locked in a Providence school and a second one temporarily disappeared.

Then the computers in Woonsocket reportedly forgot to count two polling places.

In Cumberland, voters used the wrong ballot pens and had to recast their votes.

That night, the state Board of Elections Web site posted erroneous results for North Providence races.

Three other communities had to drive their ballots to the board’s Providence offices due to technical problems.

And that doesn’t even take into account the West Warwick scenario in which Republicans were allowed to vote in a Democrat primary — leading to demands for a new election and the discovery of missing voting materials a full week later.

From one end of Rhode Island to the other, cities and towns were plagued with problems on the Sept. 9 primary, despite sporadic races and low voter turnout.

The Board of Elections said the errors weren’t widespread and none altered the final results, but the scope of the trouble raises questions about whether the Ocean State is prepared for what Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis predicts could be a record turnout of more than 70 percent in the upcoming presidential election in November.

“It definitely raises concerns about whether things will run smoothly in November,” said Christine Lopes, executive director of the government and elections watchdog group Common Cause Rhode Island. “If this is a snapshot of what we can anticipate in that election –– only larger and more magnified because of the high turnouts expected –– then that raises serious questions about whether the Board of Elections and the boards of canvassers are ready.”

Board of Elections Director Robert Kando dismisses those doubts.

“I don’t agree that there are a lot of major issues here,” he said. “If anyone tells you they ran a perfect election, they are wrong. There are going to be minor problems in any election and I didn’t notice any more minor problems here than in any past election.”

Kando likens errors at the polls to those on the roadways: just because drivers make small mistakes doesn’t mean streets are clogged with accidents.

In Cumberland, he noted, use of the wrong ballot pens was discovered before the voters even left the polling place, enabling them to recast their votes. In Providence, he said, both the misplaced memory pack and the one left in the elementary school were discovered the next morning and did not alter the outcome. And in Burrillville, Charlestown and North Smithfield, the towns that had to deliver their results by car, the ballots arrived before 10 p.m., ahead of when they might have landed electronically.

But the secretary of state expressed “some concern” about the incidents. Minor glitches, while acceptable on a day when voter turnout is less than 10 percent, cause greater problems when turnout has the potential to break records, as he predicts it will in the November presidential election, closing in on the high of 72 percent set in 1952 when presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson.

Mollis notes that several of the recent primary problems were due to human error, the likes of which could be improved with more rigorous training of poll workers. Currently, workers receive a single three-hour training session prior to each election.

Though quick to salute the efforts of poll staffers, Mollis said more preparation time, together with uniform payment and shorter shifts might help.

“You have to remember that even with the best machines and elected officials and a board [overseeing the process], the end result is at 6:30 in the morning it’s the poll worker that opens the poll, runs it for 14 hours, and then closes it at 9 p.m. and gets the results to the right place,” he said.

The high turnouts on Nov. 4 will undoubtedly ratchet up stress on poll workers, increasing the chance for errors, Lopes of Common Cause predicts. Even worse, statistics show that many of the voters who will head to the polls that day won’t have done so in four years. In that time, cities and towns have closed more than 80 polling sites to save money, meaning many voters could arrive at the wrong polling places, adding to that strain.

Common Cause and the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union are preparing to send a letter to local communities asking them to notify voters by mail of the changes in hopes of avoiding confusion.

Kando maintains that poll workers are properly trained to handle whatever happens on Election Day. “The vast majority of the time they’re doing just fine,” he said.

But a “vast majority” isn’t good enough in close elections where every vote counts, says West Warwick Sen. Stephen D. Alves.

The West Warwick Democrat lost his bid for reelection to newcomer Michael J. Pinga by fewer than 20 votes on primary day.

The problems in West Warwick were twofold. Eighteen Republicans were allowed to cast ballots in the Democratic primary instead of being given provisional ballots that customarily go to those voting in another party’s primary.

A week later, the West Warwick Board of Canvassers discovered it was missing several unused ballots –– ballots that were eventually discovered in a box of leftover elections materials that had since been sealed and returned to the Board of Elections.

Kando says neither incident altered the outcome of the election. Minor slip-ups like that, he reiterated, are unavoidable.

But Alves was less convinced. “How do you see all this happening and think this is really the will of the people?” he asked. “In a close race, they can’t fluff it like this. No one knows what the outcome would have been if this election had been run properly.”