Finger-pointing begins over slow vote tabulation

By Rob Olmstead
Daily Herald Staff Writer

Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006

 
It wasn’t overt, but the Cook County clerk’s office and its contractor Sequoia Voting Systems subtly began positioning each other Wednesday to take the fall for the dismally slow tabulation of suburban votes for the second election in a row.

While both promised a joint investigation to get to the bottom of the problem before February’s municipal elections, Clerk David Orr said his workers were not the problem and a Sequoia spokeswoman said she believed the equipment was not to blame.

“I don’t think, at this point, it is the inability of (election) judges to perform,” said Orr.

“Sequioa’s voting equipment performed very well,” said Michelle Shafer, vice-president of communications for the company.

Both parties agreed that about 51 percent of the vote totals failed to transmit wirelessly from suburban precincts to county headquarters.

Those numbers were similar to the amount that failed in Chicago. There, 46 percent of the precincts failed to transmit wirelessly, said Tom Leach of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

In both the city and suburbs, the backup plan was to take the data cartridges and memory cards to receiving stations and then try transmitting again. The difference may have been that the city’s receiving station had a dedicated T1 line to make those transmissions.

Orr, who had not slept during the night Tuesday, did not know Wednesday evening if the county receiving stations were equipped with T1 lines or if the attempt there was another wireless attempt.

But, either way, he downplayed the possibility that T1 lines were a likely factor.

“It’s possible, but I doubt it,” he said.

In any case, the city had about 72 percent of its results in and posted on the Web at 11 p.m. while the county remained stuck at about 49 percent, and stayed there for several hours. After transmissions at receiving stations failed or went slowly, the decision was made around 11 p.m. to drive the cartridges and packs downtown for manual downloading.

Although reporters Wednesday kept trying to dissect what made the county so slow compared to the city, Orr said the two defied easy comparisons. The county, for instance, has twice as many touch-screen machines, and therefore twice as many data packs to transmit.

Which raised the question of whether Cook County, and even Chicago, is trying to do too much, offering two different voting systems and insisting results be first counted at the polling place before central tabulation. The theory is that giving judges too many things to do invites problems.

“The equipment in Chicago and Cook County is unique,” said Christopher Lackner, a spokesman for Sequoia.

But apparently that burden isn’t too much for DuPage County, which also counts its votes in the polling place and offers both touch-screen and paper ballots. DuPage, however, had fewer than half of the roughly 600,000 votes that suburban Cook did this election. DuPage also uses Diebold Election Systems.

Another possible difference between Chicago’s and Cook County’s processes may be that the city began uploading its early voting ballots before 7 p.m. The county did not start until then because Orr interpreted the law as preventing him from doing so.

The early-voting ballots came from precincts all over the suburbs, and so were much bigger files than single-precinct results, said Lackner. That created a logjam in the process as precinct files backed up behind early-voting results.

Regardless of the cause, plenty of county officials were livid at the repeat performance of slow returns — something that may have financial consequences for Sequoia, which is still owed the bulk of its contract money.

“I am disgusted,” said current Cook County Board President Bobbie Steele.

President-elect Todd Stroger, whose election was in doubt late into the morning because of the slow returns, also said it was clear there was a problem.

Commissioner Peter Silvestri, who gave Orr’s office a stern warning before the fall election that another screw-up would not be tolerated, said he thought things went more smoothly for actual voters, but he was reserving judgment on the tabulation issue until he talked to Orr and his office.

Peraica’s campaign excoriated Orr’s office for downplaying the problem Tuesday night, something Orr denied he did.

“I thought I explained over and over again … that I was dissatisfied with the result,” Orr said Wednesday.

Dan Proft, a spokesman for defeated presidential candidate Anthony Peraica, early Wednesday morning chided county officials for referring to “minor” transmission problems.

“That’s like saying the Titanic was a minor boat accident,” Proft said.