Published: May 15, 2008 05:08 pm            

Unfortunate glitches spur domino effect of late vote totals on election night

The county courthouse is an interesting place to be on election night.

The media have their deadlines, so they watch the clock carefully. Candidates and office holders pore over stapled sheaves of results to try to detect trends. Retirees and some office staff show up to meet old acquaintances and watch the fun unfold.

Tuesday night in Princeton was no exception. Wilson Butt, Bill Archer and I prowled the courthouse corridors looking for statistics, quotes and angles for stories to come.

The polls closed at 7:30 p.m. and people’s attention turned to the courtroom where the cartridges from the voting precincts were being delivered and plugged into the master computer.

The rumors started soon thereafter. We were able to confirm that a computer malfunction had delayed things in the first flurry of processing.

Seven precincts’ results were reportedly run through the computer when the Secretary of State’s office informed the election personnel that because of the earlier computer malfunction, the work had to be voided and all the tabulations started over.

From more than one veteran election night participant, we heard, “It’s going to be a long night.”

I thought about my editors back at the Daily Telegraph newsroom, and all the blank spaces on five different page layouts that were to be filled with results, quotes and, we had hoped, the announcement of clear-cut winners in the “complete but unofficial” tabulations.

I had hoped that with the advent of computer voting, results would come in faster because poll workers at the precincts wouldn’t have to count up every voter’s check marks and double-check each other’s work.

Boy, was I wrong.

One of the bottlenecks occurred in the basement of the courthouse. With Wilson Butt leading the way, we came upon the long line of precinct representatives, still waiting after 10 p.m. to turn in their cartridges and sign some sort of release form.

This was 2 1/2 hours after the polls closed. The basement corridor was narrow. There were very few chairs for people to sit in. The workers had been on the job since 5:30 a.m. already. I felt really sorry for them.

A poll worker told me that the form they had to sign, at a single table in the basement, asked them to list separately the number of Democratic and Republican ballots that had been voted in their assigned precinct, plus a lot of other information which in theory was already in the cartridges they carried in their hands. Then everything had to be added up and signed.

Some of the representatives were not ready for this, the worker told me, and the delays continued to mount.

The cartridges were then transported up two floors to the courtroom where the results were generated. Then we waited for people to take the typed summaries out of the photocopier, and go from pile to pile of papers, collating and stapling them.

I got some funny looks when I leaned over the railing that serves as the “bar” in the courtroom and counted the cartridges. There wasn’t anything else that I could do while I was waiting for distribution of the “10 cume” report — the totals from 10 out of 61 precincts.

At 11:02 p.m. on election night, 35 cartridges had been put in the gray trays reserved for completed work, and we still didn’t have the reports from the first 10 precincts in our hands. The television crews, who’d been doing their best to get stories done without any results to tell, had done what they could do and soon would be packing up.

With our trusty cell phones in hand, we print reporters reported what we could as the deadline neared. Editors assessed the reality of the situation and reworked pages. We all were disappointed that readers of Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph would not have complete results.

On the top floor of the courthouse, the fun continued to unfold until well after midnight.

Those who didn’t have deadlines were talking about how things get done in government, who would likely do well against whom in the upcoming general election, and the significance, if any, of Hillary Clinton’s large margin of victory in the Democratic presidential primary.

We’re hoping by November it’ll be another interesting, fun election night — with a lot less disappointment to go around.

Tom Bone is a Daily Telegraph columnist, sports writer and editorial cartoonist. Contact him at tbone@bdtonline.com.

        

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