Incumbent Centre County commissioner Rich Rogers, facing a slim margin of defeat in a spring Democratic primary, called Monday for ‘at minimum a manual recount’ in the county’s May 17 commissioner races.
‘We did this election with faulty ballots,’ Rogers said at a county Board of Elections meeting. He said the ballots could ‘call into question the integrity of the election process.’
Rogers, of Bellefonte, listed several concerns, including reports that some ballots were too big to be scanned and required trims of one-sixteenth of an inch. If any those ballots were trimmed after voters logged their votes on them, Rogers said, ‘that’s a major ethical violation.’
He also suggested that the ballots’ width and thickness could have been altered by humidity — and that may have affected how electronic scanners read the votes, Rogers said. He pointed to a 2006 New York Times article distributed to the elections board by Republican commissioner nominee Chris Exarchos; it indicates that moisture in testing documents led to some erroneous SAT scoring.
Moreover, Rogers said, wondered aloud how elections officials ensured that computer memory cards replaced on May 17 lost no information. And he said ‘under votes’ in the Democratic and Republican commissioners races represented some 23 percent of the ballots cast in those contests.
That ‘seems awfully high in an election of such importance’ and ‘brings into question’ whether optical scanners properly recognized ballots, Rogers said.
The optical scanners have been used in Centre County since 2008.
A voter registers an ‘under vote’ when he selects, say, just one candidate in a race where he could select two. In the county commissioners primary, voters in each major party were asked to pick two nominees for the three-seat commissioner board. All three seats are in play this year.
On the Democratic side, incumbent commissioners Chairman Jon Eich finished first, with 4,317 votes, according to preliminary, unofficial returns. Challenger Michael Pipe, of State College, finished second, with 2,808 votes, the unofficial returns show.
Eich also resides in State College.
If the results hold up, that would put Pipe 30 votes ahead of Rogers — enough to give Pipe the second Democratic nomination.
Pipe did not speak at — and did not appear to attend — Monday’s Board of Elections meeting in Bellefonte. Republican nominees Exarchos, a challenger, and Steve Dershem, an incumbent, were in attendance, however.
Dershem, of Bellefonte, voiced strong concern with the scanning process for voter ballots.
Normally, elections officials explained, when voters feed their ballots into scanning machines, the machines alert the voters if they’ve ‘over-voted’ — that is, if they have selected more candidates than allowed in a particular race.
When that happens, a voter may submit his ballot, anyway, or choose to nullify his ballot and vote again.
But in some relatively rare cases, if a voter chooses to leave behind his ballot and have a poll worker scan it later, the voter does not have a chance to correct any over-votes, elections officials said. If the voter has over-voted, all his selections in that particular race are nullified automatically. (‘Under votes’ are permitted and counted.)
Dershem emphasized that 168 voters were reported to have over-voted in the May 17 commissioners races. He suggested that those voters had been disenfranchised, though it was not clear how many of them had knowingly submitted those over-votes.
‘The voter assumes some responsibility for an over-vote,’ said elections board Chairman Leonard Holliday. ‘It’s clearly written on the ballot’ exactly how many candidates a voter may select.
‘We at the election board don’t know what’s in the voter’s mind,’ Holliday said.
County elections director Joyce McKinley confirmed that in at least six or seven Centre County precincts — as in other parts of Pennsylvania — poll workers had some difficulty scanning ballots. Some ballots were put aside to be scanned after their respective voters had left, McKinley said.
‘But the ballots did get scanned,’ she said. The county has 89 precincts.
Exarchos, of College Township, asked the elections board: ‘What assurance do you have that when (a ballot) was accepted (after multiple scanning attempts) that it was read correctly?’
Holliday said he could not give say with complete certainty that such a ballot would have been read accurately.
But the odds are better than they would be with a touch-screen machine, Holliday said, referring to technology endorsed during Exarchos’ earlier tenure as commissioners chairman.
‘I thought we were staying away from politics,’ Exarchos said.
‘Right,’ Holliday replied. (He had said earlier that the elections board would address only operational matters — not politics — at its Monday meeting.)
McKinley said elections-office workers manually count two percent of ballots in every election, checking to make sure those tallies done by hand match those done electronically. That’s done during the process to make official and certify the election results, she said.
As of Monday afternoon, McKinley said, the elections office had completed official counts for 31 of the 89 precincts. It’s on track to finish official counts for the rest within a couple days, and will log any inconsistencies among the tallies by hand and those done electronically, she said.
McKinley said the reported ballot-scanning issues last week involved Republican ballots, not Democratic ones.
The elections board agreed to let the elections office finish the official counts, then reconvene later this week to review that data and decide how to proceed. It’s expected to consider then whether a complete manual recount is needed. (The board’s next meeting date was not announced Monday.)
‘I think there may be a few mistakes’ in the balloting process, Holliday said, ‘but I don’t think it would change much.’
Likewise, elections board member John Saylor said that ‘I think overall the election was held properly and was a legitimate, honest election.’
The third board member, Lawrence Bickford, said he would not make a final decision or judgment until the elections office completes its official count.
StateCollege.com will have ongoing coverage.
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