By SCOTT SMITH
Tribune staff writer
May 07, 2008 12:09 am
—
Stacks of unused Republican ballots were piled up at various Howard County precincts Tuesday, as county registered Republicans crossed over in huge numbers to vote in the Democratic presidential primary.
With voting running 3-1 Democratic across the county, some predominately Republican districts simply ran out of Democrat ballots, forcing Howard County Clerk Mona Myers to have additional ballots printed.
Unlike the pre-ordered ballots, the ballots printed Tuesday had to be hand-counted.
Myers said 22 of Howard County’s 68 polling places turned in hand-counted ballots, numbering in the hundreds. No exact number of hand-counted ballots was available, but midway through the counting, Myers said she’d received more than 200.
That unexpected circumstance, paired with voting machine malfunctions in more than a dozen Kokomo city precincts, caused a delay of more than three hours getting the votes counted.
“For some reason, some of the machines would only read every two of three ballots in the District 4 race for Kokomo-Center School Board,” Myers said late Tuesday evening. “Since we didn’t know which votes scanned properly, we decided to recount, to make sure everyone’s vote counted.”
At 9:30 p.m., about a dozen election officials were huddled at the Howard County Courthouse, hand-counting red [Democratic] and blue [Republican] ballots for the school board race.
While precincts with no hand-counted ballots were all processed shortly after 8 p.m., the long ordeal of getting through the remaining 20-plus precincts was just beginning. By 10 p.m., they’d plowed through all but eight of them.
Myers said before noon that Democratic ballots were in short supply at several Howard County precincts, and more ballots were being printed. Because ballots are different at almost every precinct, and each ballot must be strictly accounted for, unused ballots at one precinct can’t simply be taken to a precinct which is running low.
Myers said she ordered 30,000 Democratic ballots, expecting that would be enough to cover the 62,000 registered voters in Howard County.
She said there are about 15,000 registered Republicans, about 12,000 registered Democrats, and about 34,000 non-partisan voters registered in the county. Turnout in the 2004 presidential primary was 22 percent.
This year, turnout was running about 39 percent. Of 20,658 votes cast by 10 p.m., 15,297 were Democrat ballots.
“I just didn’t expect so many people to cross over,” Myers said.
With some precincts expected to run out of Democrat ballots by noon, Myers had rush ordered 13,600 more ballots from Humphrey Printing.
That was enough to send 200 additional Democrat ballots to all 68 voting places in Howard County, but Myers said the shortages were especially acute in rural precincts outside Kokomo, where Republican voters usually dominate.
On top of that, the scanning machines weren’t picking up the school board votes.
“All of the machines were tested April 16, and there were no issues,” she said. “And because it’s not doing it on every ballot, we can’t find out what the issue is.”
Scott Smith may be reached at (765) 454-8569 or via e-mail at scott.smith@kokomotribune.com
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