Paperwork, caucuses made election mayhem
By BARRY HALVORSON news@leader-news.com

L-N Photo by Brenda Sommer And Sign Here… Election officials complete their paperwork Tuesday night before turning in their balloting information after that day's Primary Election, a process that took from 7 to 9:40 p.m. Shown here finalizing things are, from left: Dayle Aulds, Angela Sepeda, Gerald Adams and County Clerk Sandra Sanders.

It was a chaotic scene in the entrance of the Wharton County Annex Building on Election Night as many of the precinct judges arrived only to learn they still needed to complete their paperwork before the ballot boxes could be checked in and be counted.

Despite the seeming difficulties, Elections Administrator Judy Owens said everything went relatively well during the course of the evening at the counting location. She added that she was surprised by the turnout.

"I haven't received any complaints yet," she said. "But I also didn't think the turnout was as great as we expected it to be. I really thought we were going to have bigger numbers than we did."

She said that most of the apparent confusion at the annex was the result of voting judges being interrupted by the party caucuses or being overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork made necessary by state and federal election laws.

L-N Photo by Brenda Sommer Trying To Finish Election workers wait in line with their containers of paperwork and voting information while others had to step out of line to wrap things up at the courthouse annex in Wharton after Tuesday's primary election. Confusion also was apparent at the various party caucuses which took place that same evening.

"There was a lot of distractions at the polling places," Owens said. "At the St. Robert's polling location they were trying to close things out, but both parties were holding their caucuses and there were so many people there and the judges were afraid to ask them to leave until they were done so we told the judges to 'Bag things up and bal- ance it out here.'"

She said at other locations people were banging on the doors trying to get in for the caucusing.

"At some locations, we were dealing with a lot of hostility and a lot of misinformation," she said.

"There was an incident at Dawson (Elementary School) where they were removing the voting machines and people were asking what they were doing because they expected to be voting again. It put a lot of extra pressure on the judges at the end of a long day."

Once they arrived at the annex building, Owens said there was no single thing causing a problem.

"There is so much paperwork," she said. "There are several signatures needed, specific forms that have to be filled out and the verifying and balancing signatures and ballots so that you have a ballot for every signature. In some of the slow precincts, the judges had time to look through the forms, but at busier locations they couldn't do that."

Owens said that the precinct judges and their alternates received three hours of training and admitted that was probably not enough. She added that she plans to have a meeting with the judges to discuss how things went as a way to determine how to do things better in the future.

One effort that Owens was quick to say went above what is normally expected was the cooperation between the parties and their sharing of information and duties. She said that was particularly important with the Republican Party using both electronic and paper ballots.

"To reduce some of the verification problems, we were limiting the Republicans to using only one of the available voting machines because they did have the paper ballots. And because the Secretary of State said we had to give each one of those voters a choice, that had to be explained."

She said of the 3,617 Republic ballots cast, 1,198 were cast electronically, just slightly over 33 percent. That number was still too high in the eyes of Wharton County Republican Party Chairman Debra Medina.

"There are still a lot of questions about using the electronic voting machines and their accuracy," she said.

"We will continue to urge the use of paper ballots to protect the integrity of the voting process until something can be done to insure the accuracy of the machines. What other piece of electronic equipment that you deal with on a regular basis doesn't produce some kind of receipt to verify what you've done? There is none and it should be available on voting equipment."