Absentee voting glitch found on county Web site

Lynn Hulsey    Dayton Daily News    02 February 2008

DAYTON — If you think you applied for a Democratic absentee ballot for the March 4 primary using the Montgomery County Board of Elections online application, look again.

An apparent computer glitch causes the box marked "Democrat" to go blank on the application that needs to be printed out and signed to receive an absentee ballot. Applications for Republican ballots are unaffected.
Persons who list no party affiliation can only vote on issues, not candidates, in the March 4 primary.

Board of Elections Director Steve Harsman said his data processing staff will fix it.

Jim Carter of Butler Twp. said his daughter, Natalie Mauser-Carter, 21, discovered the problem when she downloaded an application to vote absentee because she's away at college.

When the mark for Democrat disappeared, she marked it by hand, mailed it and told Carter what happened.

"I thought it was odd and tried it a number of different ways," said Carter. "It was working properly except for Democrats."

Carter told Ellis Jacobs, senior attorney at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality Inc., which last year discovered some of the county's touch-screen electronic voting machines were inaccurately recording votes.

Harsman said Jacobs called him Friday but when the problem could not be duplicated, Harsman thought it was an issue with the settings on Carter's computer.

Harsman now thinks he couldn't duplicate it because he wasn't clicking on the "all elections'' box.

Harsman said people requesting an absentee ballot for the primary get a follow-up letter or phone call if they've not listed a party preference.

A fraction of the approximately 4,000 absentee ballot requests received so far are from online, so Harsman thinks the problem is not widespread.

But Carter said the very nature of absentee balloting makes Harsman's solution problematic. If people are out of town — which is why many people vote absentee — they may not get the notification, Carter said.