A little advice for the next election

If hard work were a guarantee against calamity, Flathead County's election department workers would have sailed through counting ballots last week.

It didn't turn out that way.

Weary employees were still counting Wednesday afternoon, some in the same clothing they'd left home in Tuesday morning.

The election was the culmination of weeks of overtime and planning, but even before the polls closed, complaints began.

Some people waited two hours to vote. Particularly slow was the polling place at the Elks Club, where voters complained about how long it took precinct workers to move people through.

When the polls closed, the tally was sluggish. By midnight, only three of 42 precincts had been counted. By then, it was clear that something was wrong with one of the ballot issues.

All three precincts showed that 100 percent of their voters favored lifting the ban on cyanide leach mining. Have Flathead County voters ever voted in unison on anything?

A reporter waved a red flag at Chief Election Deputy Dianne Murer. She discovered that the software vendor who programed machines to count ballots had omitted the "against" line on that constitutional initiative.

The remedy was a computer-program fix that had to be ordered in the middle of the night from Texas. The gears of the democratic process and the teeth of candidates gnashed in harmony through the night. By 1:30 a.m., there were still no election results in Flathead County.

It was County Clerk and Recorder Paula Robinson's first general election. In charge of the election department, she had made changes in the election-night process, calling in the sheriff's posse for security, setting up ballot-box checkpoints, and limiting the number of non-employees in the old courthouse where counting happens.

Somewhere between implementing those changes, registering new voters and purging non-voters from the rolls, and processing absentee ballots, the vital step of thoroughly checking the vote-counting program was overlooked.

We doubt that will happen again.

As Robinson critiques what went wrong, we have a suggestion.

Good and faithful precinct workers volunteer their time for elections. Their work is appreciated, particularly because it's hard to find volunteers. More - and, in some cases, more nimble - volunteers could make a difference in moving voters through the process.

How to recruit someone to spend long hours at a table, reciting the same instructions or checking identification? That's simple.

Flathead County employees outside of the clerk and recorder's office have Election Day off work. Evidently, someone believes it takes county workers an entire day to cast their ballots while the rest of us squeeze it in before work or during lunch hour.

Those employees are paid for a day's work. So let them work. While the union might prohibit some employees from working, there is a legion of non-union employees in the 400 or so people who are paid by Flathead County.

If they worked even half-day shifts, voting could be expedited.

Meanwhile, Robinson has a year to prepare for the next election. We're confident that the hard-learned lessons from this election will help the next time around. No one in Robinson's office wants to count ballots for 16 hours again.

P.S., Paula… Run a test ballot first. We're counting on you.