Requests strain election boards, county budgets

JAY COHEN

Associated Press   19 November 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Ross County elections director Nancy Bell ticked off a list of information requested by groups checking election results, mentioning everything from provisional ballot totals to voter signature poll books.

"That's not all," Bell said Friday. "There's still another eight things on the list."

Elections officials say such requests from political and advocacy groups, media outlets and other organizations are straining their staffs and budgets as they try to finish the official ballot count for the presidential election.

"We've never received anything like this before, since I started in 1985," Bell said.

Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, a Seattle-based nonprofit consumer protection organization, said the group filed public records requests for every county in the country before the election.

The requests cover items ranging from internal audit logs for central tabulating machines to all communications about problems or components of the election.

"We're wanting to verify the accuracy of the special vote count computer," Harris said. "It's the last spot the votes go. It's the one that produces the final report of the secretary of state."

Harris said they haven't examined any of the material they have received from Ohio so far because they've been busy with other election audits.

The requests are an added stress on top of verifying provisional ballots and handling last-minute changes to voting procedures resulting from various federal lawsuits, said Lois Enlow, director of the Portage County Elections Board in northeast Ohio.

"Some of them (the requests) I can answer easily," she said. But some public records requests ask for information that the board doesn't include in its final report to state elections officials, she said.

Unofficial vote totals show President Bush beat Democrat John Kerry by 136,000 votes in Ohio, and Kerry has conceded there aren't enough outstanding votes to swing the state his way.

Of 29 counties that had completed checking provisional ballots, 82 percent, or 23,159 out of 28,073 ballots, are valid, according to a survey Friday by The Associated Press. Most of those counties are in rural areas.

Other counties that have completed partial tallies reported that most of the provisional ballots were being counted. In 2000, about 87 percent of provisional ballots were counted.

The Holmes County Elections Board received numerous requests from groups asking for survey information on how elections are run there, director Lisa Welch said.

"We don't have time for those things," she said.

Several county elections officials said they had put aside more time-consuming requests in order to meet the Dec. 1 deadline to complete their final count.

Once the election results are certified, counties will have to handle a recount being requested by a pair of third-party candidates. Some counties said Friday they already received checks from the candidates paying the required fee to have the boards recount their precincts.

High turnout in Ohio and the various public records requests have forced several elections officials to request more money from their county for overtime, printing and other expenses.

The Holmes County board has a budget of about $100,000, has already gotten an extra $12,000 from county commissioners and likely will ask for another $2,000, Welch said. That would mean a 14 percent increase over the expected costs of running the board for the year.

"I don't know if we're going to be able to meet payroll for December without going to the commissioners," said Sharon Davis, the director of the Clark County Board of Elections.