Published: May 06, 2008 02:30 pm            

Ballot shortage in Howard County

Howard County Clerk Mona Myers cited an unexpected number of registered Republican voters crossing over to the Democratic primary for a ballot shortage early Tuesday.

Myers said before noon that Democratic ballots were in short supply at several Howard County precincts, and more ballots were being printed.

The ballot shortage, however, is expected to cause a significant delay in getting the vote counted after polls close this evening.

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.

“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’s 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 predominate.

The bad news for vote watchers, however, is that the additional ballots being printed can’t be read by optical scanning machines.

That means those ballots will have to be hand-counted at each precinct, and the vote totals added to the machine-scanned totals before final vote tallies will be available.

Usually it takes around two hours to get all the optically scanned votes officially counted. Hand-counting votes should push that deadline back considerably.

As of 2:30 p.m. there were no reports of Howard County precincts running out of Democrat ballots.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.