By VICKI URBANIK

The Porter County chapter of the League of Women Voters of Indiana will hold a post-election public meeting on Saturday to hear from the public about voting glitches, a forum that was welcomed by a top county election official.

Porter County Clerk Pam Fish noted that she and the two directors of Voter Registration Office are relatively new in their positions and want to hear the public’s concerns about problems in Tuesday’s primary. “We’re all interested in making the process better,” she said.

However, she also said that based on what happened Tuesday, some changes have already been identified. She said she hopes to set up separate phone lines for the public and for the poll workers to call on election day, while also possibly bringing in more temporary workers who get advanced computer training.

The biggest problem in Tuesday’s Porter County primary dealt with polling sites running out of Democrat ballots. More than 80 percent of the more than 44,000 ballots cast were for Democrats.

A number of polling sites began running low on Democrat ballots by mid-day. County election workers printed up paper copy ballots and the County Sheriff’s Department delivered them to the precincts throughout the day. At one point, the county’s printer “died on us,” Fish said, prompting officials to arrange for flight out of the Porter County Airport to get more ballots from the county’s software vendor in Ottawa, Ill. The plane trip took about 30 minutes, she said.

Fish estimated that an overall 6,000 additional ballots were needed during the day. The paper copy ballots, which couldn’t be read by the voting machine, were hand counted on Wednesday, which Fish noted will change the final election results, though not enough to make a difference in the outcomes.

Fish said there was no way to know, when the county had to place the ballot order on March 1, that the Democrat presidential race would be as intense as it was. She noted that Republican Mitt Romney was still a viable presidential candidate at the time. She raised the alternative scenario: The county may have found itself without enough Republican ballots if, sometime after March 1, one of the Democrat presidential candidates dropped out, and the Republican contest between Romney and John McCain became the lighting rod race.

Fish said while there was no way to predict the huge Democrat interest by March 1, there was also no way to predict that so many Republicans would vote Democrat on Tuesday. She said county election workers had to respond to the events as they unfolded, and that overall, she was pleased with how the election was handled.

She noted that this year, the county placed a much greater emphasis on training poll workers than in the past. In addition, she said the Secretary of State’s office did an excellent job preparing a poll worker training video. She said all the training paid off, with not very many problems other than the lack of Democrat ballots.

“We could not have asked for a better staff,” she said of the poll workers.

One poll worker, though, is hardly impressed. Pat Frye, a Democrat inspector for Westchester 3, said her precinct started to run low on Democrat ballots at around 1 p.m. She said her precinct called repeatedly and couldn’t get through to county offices or was told that the ballots were on their way. The new ballots, however, didn’t arrive until 5 p.m.

She said the county owes an apology, and full explanation, to the public on why some voters had to wait for as long as they did and why they couldn’t vote as they wanted to. “I’ve worked the polls for 20 years, and I’ve never, ever been so ashamed,” she said.

It was estimated that about 10 out of the county’s 124 polling sites actually ran out of Democrat ballots for any given time; the others that called in got the new ballots delivered before they actually ran out.

Fish said she is not aware that any voter was denied the right to vote, something that she said would have been unacceptable.

Voters at precincts without Democrat ballots were told that they could wait until new ones were delivered, or that they could vote by coming to the Voter Registration Office, Fish said. A number of people did vote at the county office.

Fish acknowledged that it was difficult to get through to the Voter Registration Office on Tuesday, with its eight phone lines that “rang off the hook” from 5 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. that night. Even if the county had more phone lines, she said, workers on the other end needed computer access to effectively deal with the calls.

Fish said one common problem that came up Tuesday dealt with poll workers calling to check the eligibility of voters. For some reason, the voters were not shown as registered on the poll books, even though the county office could confirm, in its computer system, that they were registered.

Fish said it’s not clear what caused that problem, but that one explanation is that when the state printed up the poll books, some of the data for new or revised voter registrations didn’t transfer to the poll books. She noted that there were complaints from voter registration officials throughout Indiana about how slow the state system was in allowing voter information to be entered.

League Meeting

The League of Women Voters meeting will be held at 10 a.m. at the Family and Youth Services Bureau, 263 W. Lincolnway, Valparaiso.

A statement from the League said that at this meeting, voters will be able to document their problems, which the League will then submit to the Porter County Election Board. Call Martha Willis at 762-6642, or email marthawillis@verizon.net

 with any questions and concerns.

The Indiana League noted that it has been working for three years to document voting problems throughout the state and has been addressing the problems with county clerks and the elections boards in all the counties participating in the league’s poll workers and poll watcher surveys.

Posted 5/9/2008