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Summit and Stark counties miss state deadline
By David Knox
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Tuesday, Dec 02, 2008
When is 100 percent complete not 100 percent complete?
When counting Ohioans' votes in last month's presidential election.
That was the confusing situation across the state as county election officials struggled with an avalanche of paper absentee and provisional ballots.
In the end, the system didn't break — it just ran slower than in any election in recent memory.
More than a dozen of Ohio's 88 counties, including Summit and Stark, missed finishing their unofficial counts by noon Nov. 5 — the deadline on the day after the election set by the Ohio secretary of state.
Fortunately, speed wasn't critical to this year's presidential election. Sen. Barack Obama's margin of victory in electoral votes across the nation was too big to be upset by late-counted ballots in Ohio or any other state.
The situation could have been different if the race for the White House had come down to Ohio's 20 electoral votes, as it did in 2004, when George W. Bush beat Democrat Sen. John Kerry by 118,601 votes — 2.1 percent of the 5.6 million ballots cast.
Or, what if the Ohio vote had been even closer — as it was in Florida in 2000, when Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes and weeks of litigation ensued.
''If we had a 500-vote or even 5,000-vote margin, it would have been Florida all over again,'' said Daniel P. Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.
''The only difference would have been instead of fighting over punch cards, we would have been fighting over whether to count provisional and absentee ballots.''
Marijean Donofrio, Summit County's election director, agreed. ''If it was close, we probably would be flooded with attorneys second-guessing everything we were doing,'' she said.
Ironically, the slowdown in the vote counting was partially the result of reforms designed to avoid the long lines experienced on Election Day in 2004 and the problems in 2000 that plagued Florida, which used punch-card voting machines prone to a vari
ety of mechanical problems that resulted in disputed ballots.
Ohio counties abandoned punch cards for touch-screen computers and optical-scan ballots, which require voters to fill in a ''bubble'' next to their candidate of choice.
Critics also charged that Florida, which denies felons the right to vote even after they have served their sentences, used inaccurate database searches that struck many minority residents with no criminal records from the rolls of registered voters.
Provisional ballots allow people whose eligibility is questioned to still cast votes on Election Day. Their ballots are counted if their eligibility is verified.
''I think it's obviously a good thing that voters can't be turned away without casting some sort of a ballot,'' Tokaji said. ''But it does increase uncertainty. It increases the margin of litigation'' over eligibility.
Provisionals at issue
Squabbling over provisionals is the reason the official state results haven't been released. Two races, the 15th Congressional and 19th Ohio House districts, remain to be decided pending a court ruling on how to count about 1,000 disputed provisional ballots in Franklin County.
Another major change, aimed at shortening lines at polling places, was early voting, which was instituted in 2005 when Ohio expanded absentee voting by dropping the requirement that residents give a reason for not voting on Election Day.
Early voting proved especially popular in larger counties such as Summit, which set up an early voting center at the Jobs Center on Tallmadge Avenue in Akron.
Donofrio said about 90,000 absentee ballots — nearly a third of all votes cast in Summit County for the Nov. 4 election — came in early.
Unfortunately not that early.
''We got tons that came in the last few days'' before the election, Donofrio said.
Adding to the workload was a ''double-bubble'' problem, she said.
Many absentee voters apparently were confused by the directions and after filling in the bubble for their candidate also wrote in the candidate's name in the write-in space and darkened a second bubble.
To make those votes countable by the scanner, Donofrio said, ''we had to remake the whole ballot.''
Another complication caused by the large number of absentee and provisional ballots was uncertainly about the progress of the counting.
Anyone monitoring the Summit County Board of Elections Web site couldn't be blamed for thinking the unofficial count was complete by about 1:40 a.m. Wednesday — about six hours after the polls had closed. The ''Summary Report'' stated that all 475 precincts in the county were counted and a total of 266,046 ballots had been cast in the presidential race.
A revised tally was posted on the Web site about 3 p.m. Wednesday, listing nearly 4,000 more votes for president than the first ''100 percent'' report. The official results, completed Nov. 25, turned up 8,517 more presidential votes.
The gap between election night and the official total was 12,474 votes, or 4.5 percent of the total — more than double the percentage gap of the two previous presidential elections.
Stark County, which used touch-screen computers for most voters, had an even more difficult time with the flood of paper absentee ballots. On election night, Stark officials managed to tally only 133,063 presidential votes — 71 percent of the final official total — before they stopped posting updates to their Web site about 2 a.m.
Stark, along with Franklin, Hamilton and Butler counties, was still counting votes Wednesday evening and didn't complete its unofficial count until about 8 p.m. Again, the gap between the unofficial and official totals was more than double the two previous presidential elections.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is counting on improvements in training and faster scanning equipment to help. ''Because of the increased use of paper ballots because of absentee voting, there's a need for improved technology,'' Brunner said. ''That's in the works.''
Brunner has scheduled an Ohio Elections Summit for today at the Ohio Historical Society near the state fairgrounds in Columbus to evaluate how the voting went and to discuss possible changes. The all-day session is expected to include testimony from elections officials, legislators, election-law experts and the public.
''We want to hear from people about their experiences,'' Brunner said.
David Knox can be reached at 330-996-3532 or dknox@thebeaconjournal.com.
When is 100 percent complete not 100 percent complete?
Get the full article here.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
San Francisco, CA
Posted 06:01 PM, 12/02/2008
Come on already!
Posted 06:10 PM, 12/02/2008
Get it over with!
San Francisco, Ca
Posted 06:22 PM, 12/02/2008
What happen to computer generated results?
San Francisco, CA
Posted 06:24 PM, 12/02/2008
Yeah!
The Great City in, OH
Posted 07:41 PM, 12/02/2008
Get 'er done already!
