Forms conflicted on Election Day

Vote counts posted by the Suffolk County Board of Elections (BOE) after the polls closed on November 2 had Shelter Island poll watchers scratching their heads.

How did the county come up with a 586-562 result in the justice court race, just a 24-point margin for Democrat Mary-Faith Healey over Republican Tom Carr? Local poll watchers from both political parties agreed the result was 742 to 458. Those results were consistent among the Island’s four voting districts.

And if the county election officials got that race wrong, how solid were the other results they reported election night? Not very, Long Islanders learned this weekend when unofficial results for the First District State Assembly and Congressional races changed by hundreds of votes.

So what went wrong with the county’s first general election with new optical scanning voting machines?

“It’s in the call-in,” said Wade Badger, a Shelter Island resident who has worked the polls for years. Local election inspectors who called in the results Tuesday night and BOE staff receiving those calls in Yaphank seemed to be working off of two different forms, according to Mr. Badger and Phyllis Gates, both of whom worked the polls at Election District (ED) 3 in the Heights.

Ms. Gates, a veteran election inspector, said that the process of recording and reporting the vote was simple with the recently retired lever machines. The back of the machine was removed, the numbers were read off the analog counters embedded in the machine and were recorded on a form. The numbers on the form were then called in to BOE personnel. “We were always working from the same form,” she said.

Not so this year. “When the results were called in, the BOE representative to whom we reported was working with a form totally different from the one on which we were required to report scanned results, making it necessary for us to hunt through a very long list of candidates and votes to actually report results.” The election officials asked for results by ballot position: 1a, 1b, 1c, etc. instead of by race or candidate and she had to scan through three pages of forms to find totals for the row and column coordinates sought.

“There were several numbers that I could not find,” Ms. Gates said.

“With the new machines,” Mr. Badger explained, “a tape is produced that names the candidates from left to right, gives a candidate’s total and then breaks it down by party.

“When we read this off, we record it on a single sheet of paper that is in the same order and format as the tape information. This sheet was not ordered 1a, 1b, 1c,” he said.

Lois Charls, the chairperson for Shelter Island’s ED 2 in the Center, reported the same problem. After calling in the results, she concluded, “We had the form one way, and they had it another way … it was very confusing.” She couldn’t reach the BOE by phone for about 45 minutes after the polls closed and when she did, “They had us skip all over the page.”

“It was a very stressful day,” she added. It began at 5 a.m. with the discovery that election officials had delivered the wrong voting machines to the Center and Cobbetts Lane firehouses. Voters at ED 2 and ED 1 could not vote by machine until about 8:45 a.m., after an election official had the machines switched. Mrs. Charls said that in her 10 years as an election inspector, she’d never had a day “quite like that before.”

“They just don’t have their act totally together,” Mr. Badger commented. If the BOE had been adequately prepared, they would have changed the reporting sheet, he said.

“A few bumps in the road” were to be expected during this first general election using state-mandated voting machines, said Jesse Garcia, an assistant to Republican BOE Commissioner Wayne Rogers, during a telephone interview Friday. “Inspectors were working 16 hours … there were bound to be some mistakes when closing the machines down and calling in the results.”

Reporting by phone was slower than in years past, Mr. Garcia conceded, but was the result of having so much staff out at the polls to ensure that voting went smoothly. Assisting the voters with using the new machines was the primary goal and “that was achieved,” Mr. Garcia commented.

“In every election, even with the lever machines, there have been mistakes in reporting,” he said. If election officials are made aware of an obvious error election night, the commissioners may decide to fix it on the spot, he added. But once the unofficial results are posted, corrections must wait for recanvassing.

After the re-canvassing of votes, which began this week, the two election commissioners — Mr. Rogers and his Democratic counterpart Anita Katz — will conduct a post mortem of the new voting program “just as they did after the primary,” Mr. Garcia said.

The key is to provide the voter “a simple, quick and accurate way to vote,” he said.

Not every Suffolk County election district experienced a conflict in reporting protocol. Jeri Woodhouse, a poll worker in East Marion, said that while she had great difficulty reaching the BOE by phone — she called continuously from the time the results were recorded until 11 p.m. — she had no trouble reading results off her form sequentially.

The Reporter requested blank copies of election reporting forms from the BOE but did not receive a response before this issue went to press.