Flawed count = Human error

Election officials explain what went wrong

RICHARD RUBIN AND CARRIE LEVINE  Charlotte Observer  09 November 2004

Mecklenburg County election officials double- and triple-counted some votes last week, while leaving others completely uncounted.

Elections director Michael Dickerson attributed the foul-up in tabulating early-voting results to human error on a hectic election night.

"The election was done right. The results were not reported right, and that was our fault," Dickerson said Monday in the first detailed explanation of what happened. He said all mistakes were unintentional and unlikely to have happened in previous elections.

The revised totals reported late last week after an audit are right, except for minor corrections. But the counting and arguing seem unlikely to end quickly.

This morning, Dickerson will explain what happened to the county's Board of Elections. The board two Democrats and one Republican still has plenty of work to do. They must determine the eligibility of 6,210 provisional ballots, cast by voters who could not be found in registration books on Election Day.

Once that work is done, the results will become official.

Generally, provisional votes favor Democrats, and most watchers expect a Democratic sweep of all three at-large seats for Mecklenburg County commissioner.

But Republican Ruth Samuelson, in third place now by just 28 votes over Democrat Wilhelmenia Rembert, could be close enough to seek a recount. She also could cite the counting errors in a formal protest, and has not ruled out that option.

"I feel like I have a duty to the people who supported me to challenge within reason," she said. "I'm not going to be unreasonable, but I'm not going to walk away from something that ought to be challenged."

Mecklenburg County's problems are less severe than those in coastal Carteret County, where more than 4,500 votes were irretrievably lost.

After a frenzied week of counting, double-checking and nearly nonstop media interviews, Dickerson said he and his staff found the errors.

Can't start till 2 p.m.

The problem stemmed, in part, from the short time frame counties get to tally results. Even though more than two weeks of early voting had ended the previous Saturday, state law prevents election officials from opening the voting machines until 2 p.m. on Election Day.That created a crunch, exacerbated by high turnout and a long ballot. While running an election and counting other ballots, election officials had to get results from the 97 machines used for early voting.

Each early-voting machine contains an electronic card that holds the results, and those were downloaded onto 13 laptops.

Initially, Dickerson said, the idea was to take the machines from each of the 13 early-voting sites, and make sure all data from each site was downloaded to the same laptop. In some cases, that happened.

But in other cases, some voting machines were downloaded twice. For example, people who voted on a machine at Beatties Ford Road Regional Library had their votes counted twice, once each on two separate laptops. Those votes heavily favored Democrats.

The votes from three machines at Morrison Regional Library in a Republican-leaning area were not downloaded at all, Dickerson said.

In several cases, the votes on some laptops doubled themselves, because workers hit the Enter key during the downloading process. That caused the download to restart, without clearing the previous numbers.

In one case, the results from a voting machine at Plaza-Midwood Library were downloaded onto two laptops, and then doubled on one of them, meaning that those votes were triple-counted.

At least seven of the 97 machines were counted more than once. Seven were not counted at all, Dickerson said.

As of now, all early votes have been counted properly and none has been lost, Dickerson said.

Ted Arrington, who spent 12 years as a Republican member of the county board of elections, said it was difficult, if not impossible, to be fast and accurate on election night.

"I'm sure this is somebody just screw(ing) up," said Arrington, who chairs the political science department at UNC Charlotte. "Because if you were going to cheat, you would want to cheat in a way that it wasn't so obviously discoverable."

GOP raised questions

Because the results were posted so late election night, no one noticed the error then.

County Republicans, puzzling over their unexpected loss, discovered and pointed out the problem last Wednesday. Election officials retallied the votes on Thursday, using the printouts from the 97 machines instead of the laptop count.

"I am looking for perfection on this count, so that nobody has any doubts," Dickerson said.

He said the standard audit before today's official certification of the election would have caught the error. That certification could be delayed if the counting of provisional ballots takes more than one day.

But some local officials are starting to question how well the process worked, particularly because election-night outcomes have a powerful psychological effect on candidates and the public.

"I know mistakes will happen," said Michael D. Evans, who chairs the county Democratic Party. "But this sounds to me like a rather significant one, and it sounds like we should be doing more to avoid things like this in the future."

Election-night totals often change, said Democratic county commissioner Parks Helms.

"I still have confidence in our voting procedures and in Michael Dickerson and his staff," he said. "We must realize that in elections like the one we have just come through, human error is inevitable."

Both parties will have observers and lawyers attending today's meeting.

Elections board member Phil Summa, a Republican, praised the staff for allowing the public and the media so much access.

"There's been a little bit of Chicken Littleness about the whole thing: the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling," he said. "Unofficial is unofficial."