    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 10115
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, November 6, 2008 - 11:33 am: | 
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Laredo Morning Times - Nov. 6, 2008, by Zach Lindsey
http://www.lmtonline.com/articles/2008/11/06/news/doc4912bbd4ef29b011092181.txt
Counting ballots all night long
It was 3:42 a.m. Wednesday when the final tally was released for Webb County's General Election.
Shortly afterward, the ballot counting room in the Webb County Administrative Office was a mess of papers and empty soda bottles, and one young ballot counter sat yawning with his tie untied - it had been a long night.
To begin with, nine precincts ran out of ballots and were forced Tuesday night to use photocopies, which had to be hand-counted.
However, a tally excluding the 1,256 photocopied ballots wasn't even released until 1:52 a.m. It was nearly another two hours later before election employees could call it a night.
In total, 45,540 votes were cast in Webb County.
Election Judge Armando Lopez minimized the problem with photocopied ballots.
"The biggest problem that we had to deal with was the number of ballots that voters marked in a matter that the machines could not count, and it had to be resolved on a ballot-by-ballot basis," Lopez said.
Some voters didn't mark the ballot dark enough, but one problem was that, because the pencil used to fill in the ballots had no eraser, if a voter put a small mark in another bubble, and then changed their mind, the machine would not read the ballot.
"They had to be resolved by visual inspection in an attempt to ascertain the intent of the voter," Lopez said.
If it weren't for those confusing ballots, Lopez thought the ballot counting might have been wrapped up as much as three hours earlier.
"That's a long, tedious process," Lopez said of the visual inspection process.
"Obviously, you have to preserve what the voter did so if someone wants to see that later, they can tell.
That process is what they call the resolution process, and it's literally done once the machine has counted everything normally and we have to deal with all the spit-out ballots."
Lopez said that the problem was not the counting machines themselves.
"The machines started to slow down every once in a while, but that's to be expected if you're running them from 9:30 in the morning all the way to 2 in the (next) morning," Lopez said.
The consensus among counters is that the problem could be solved by voter education.
"There were school district personnel there, and they all saw the same situation," Lopez said.
"They all discussed hopefully in the future them doing some kind of voter education on public access or something like that, to teach people how to mark those ballots." |
