Fixing election glitches

Flathead County office still 'working to get it right'

With her sights set on next year's presidential election, Flathead County Clerk and Recorder Paula Robinson has begun putting together an election task force to help the process run smoothly.

"It's kind of like planning a huge dinner for 55,000 people," said Robinson, whose job duties include election administrator. "We try to prepare for every potential disaster."

The committee, which will include Robinson, a citizen at large, several attorneys and an individual with a disability, will come together in early January to begin preparing for Flathead's primary election in mid-2008.

"There are so many areas that need to be addressed," she said. "We have to look at changes to election laws, voting facilities for people with handicaps" and the county election process as a whole.

GLITCHES in the voting system have plagued Flathead County in recent years, and this year's off-year election was no exception. The biggest problem on Nov. 6 was the election department's use of a ballot scanner typically used at the precinct level.

During the late-night crunch to finish tabulating mail ballots from the Whitefish city election, election officials fed the ballots too fast through the machine, causing it to jam and undercount valid votes. That machine - Election Systems and Software's Model 100 - typically is used at a slower pace at polling places, with one voter at a time putting his or her ballot in, Robinson said.

The miscount put Whitefish City Council candidate Turner Askew as the winner over Martin McGrew by four votes, but subsequent recounts the next day pushed McGrew ahead by two votes. A hand recount will be conducted Monday morning.

In hindsight, Robinson said, the department should have used the larger Model 650, the optical scanner it typically uses in elections.

"Our gut feeling was to [recount] the votes that night on the M650," she said. "If we'd just go with our gut feelings it would be better. We need to focus on accuracy over getting it done quickly."

Another minor glitch involved three-dozen ballots that were ripped or chopped up by a machine that opens the envelopes. That prompted the election resolution committee to piece the torn ballots back together and fill out a new ballot for that voter that could be run through the scanning machine. Typically, the county uses a mechanical jogger to push ballots to the bottom of the envelope, but it wasn't used on Nov. 6, Robinson said.

THE ELECTION department was beset with problems in the midterm election in 2006, too, when officials didn't begin counting a record number of absentee ballots until the evening hours. The counting could have begun as early as 7 a.m., but the resolution board couldn't convene until late in the day.

And there were glitches with election software in 2006.

Primary-election results were delayed for many hours because of software issues, so election officials tested the system for the general election and thought they'd corrected the problems.

Despite the tests, tabulators found that vote information on computer memory cards for each precinct didn't coincide with the manual reports, so election officials were forced to manually input the results.

A new late-voter registration law compounded Flathead County's problems. The election department processed more than 350 last-minute voters on Election Day at the courthouse, which delayed the setup for vote counting.

"The Election Day registration and voting, that's part of why we're late," Robinson said. "We used that day to prepare" in the past.

THE 2004 vote count was troublesome, too. Flathead County's ballot count continued for nearly 20 hours after the polls closed, due to problems with a new county system, record turnout, improperly marked ballots, difficulties processing absentee votes, a technology lapse and human error.

It was only the second election using the new optical scanning machine to count paper ballots. For many years, Flathead elections were conducted like clockwork with the old punch-card system, but Florida's "hanging chad" fiasco during the presidential election in 2000 prompted a mass switch to optical scanning.

The 2004 election was Robinson's first general election, and she's been striving to resolve problems since then.

"Of everything under my direction [as clerk and recorder] I really love elections," she said. "It has to be accurate. We keep working to get it right."

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com