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EDITORIAL
Election problems
(Published September 20, 2004)

Lopsided electoral contests, like the ones in the District’s Sept. 14 primary, tend to make people stop paying attention to the details associated with counting the votes on election night.

Yet, the good folks at the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics should stop patting themselves on the back long enough to recognize that they once again failed to tabulate election results in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, they seem too enamored with trying to make costly, flawed computer technology work to realize that there might be some much simpler ways to get the unofficial election results tallied and released to the public.

On Sept. 14, most D.C. residents retired for the night after hearing vote tallies that, according to election officials, were incomplete for every one of the District’s 142 voting precincts. About 90 minutes after the polls closed, election officials released vote totals from only one type of voting machine – the scanner for paper ballots – used in 88 polling places.

Those early vote totals were the last heard from election officials until almost 1 a.m. on Sept. 15, when elections board Chairman Wilma Lewis and Executive Director Alice Miller announced to the few news media representatives and citizens still waiting that they were closing up shop for the night even though they knew that voting machine totals from two precincts were still missing from their new tally.

The explanation on election night was that precinct captains had failed to deliver computer cartridges from those two touch-screen voting machines to the election board’s offices. In answer to reporters' inquiries, Miller said she had been unable to speak with those precinct captains but was sure that the cartridges were securely locked up at the polling places. Miller said election officials had no idea how many voters had cast ballots on those two missing machines and had not attempted to compare the total number of ballots so far counted in those precincts to the number of ballots given to precinct voters. "You expect us to count those cards tonight?" Miller responded to The Common Denominator’s editor.

Well, yes.

Clearly, election officials are making no attempt on election night to ensure that the number of ballots given to voters matches the number of ballots cast or spoiled. Aside from dealing with Election Day problems, such as machine breakdowns and computer software glitches, shouldn’t somebody be doing a simple ballot count to ensure the integrity of the election?

Three days after the election, on Sept. 17, Miller told The Common Denominator that one of the missing voting machine cartridges had been found inside the precinct’s ballot bag that was delivered by precinct workers to the election board’s offices on election night.

"We really don’t need a negative story about election workers," Miller protested when The Common Denominator continued to seek details about precinct-closing and vote-counting procedures.

It’s the election managers, more so than the precinct workers, whose job performance deserves public scrutiny.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator