Worker bungles possible, clerk says

Officials said they can curb computer snags, but human errors by frenzied hired hands are always likely.

By Ed Asher
Albuquerque Tribune Reporter   29 October 2004

After all the preparations, all the training, all the computer debugging, one glitch is all but certain to crop up in Election Day vote tallies.

"There is always going to be human error," former Bernalillo County Clerk Dolores Chavez Waller says.

In an election which could break voter turnout records, officials say they are doing everything humanly possible to minimize the human error factor.

But there are no guarantees, they say.

"Come on, human errors occur everywhere. That's why they're called 'unofficial results,' " County Clerk Mary Herrera said Thursday.

"I would say my workers are working long hours, nonstop with very little breaks. But they are going to do the very best job they can for Bernalillo County."

Actually, her workers will be getting breaks. She says they will be working rotating shifts to avoid fatigue.

Herrera has assigned 180 temporary workers to the county's warehouse at 2400 Broadway Blvd. S.E. to handle the absentee counts.

That's where the potential for human error is most likely to occur, election observers say. That's because, typically, about 10 percent of the paper ballots are rejected by the optical scanning machines and must be counted by hand.

The hand count is entered into a computer manually - by punching a keyboard.

The absentee workers will be assigned to shifts, with about 30 showing up at midnight Election Day.

The other 150 will begin about 6 a.m. Herrera said those workers can relieve and rotate with each other throughout Election Day.

Herrera hopes her plan, along with election worker classes, will cut down on the potential for human error.

Those errors occasionally crop up in big ways. In the 2000 presidential election, a Do§a Ana County election worker confused a one for a six, resulting in Al Gore getting an extra 500 votes.

Most of the errors are the result of fatigue, says Waller, county clerk from 1983 to 1986.

"People do funny things when they're tired," Waller said.

"There's always somebody who takes a ballot box home at the end of the evening, figuring they would just keep it until the next day and bring it in," she said.

"Of course, we would have to get a sheriff's deputy to go out there and find them, and they'd get a knock on the door at 1 or 2 in the morning. That's happened more often than I can tell you."

Poll workers often are at the job for 12 or more hours, she said.

"People are tired at the end of the night, they forget their training and they're in a hurry, and they make mistakes," she said.

It's not just the fatigue. It's often the pressure, Waller said.

"There's the legal pressure to make sure you've done everything legally. There's pressure from the media who want returns in time for the 10 o'clock news," Waller said.

"And there's pressure from the candidates and the political parties, and unfortunately, there's partisan suspicion.

"That pressure sometimes results in sloppy work."

Another problem that often comes up is a locked ballot box. Those boxes, containing voting machine cartridges, are not supposed to be locked when they are ped off at election central.

But sometimes a precinct judge will inadvertently lock the box, the key through a slot at the top of the box, and hand it over at election central.

The only way to get it open is to get a court order, which allows election workers to take a bolt cutter to the pad lock.

Locked ballot boxes have shown up in New Mexico elections in 1998, 2000 and 2002.

Elections administrator Jaime Diaz said he will have a state district judge on standby just in case.

And then there are computer glitches.

In the 2000 presidential election, the vote count dragged out for more than a week after the election because of problems tallying absentee and early voting ballots.

It turned out that the machines making those counts were not programed to register votes on a straight-party ticket ballot.

A similar problem in Roosevelt County resulted in 569 ballots not being counted.

Herrera says she is prepared.

"We've been testing since Wednesday," Herrera said.

"We're testing the software, we're testing the (ballot) readers, we're testing the upgrades, we're testing the network, we're testing the Internet. We're testing everything.

"It should all work. But . . . things happen. Things that are beyond our control."