Indiana Green Party

-Election Board won't apologize to Greens, but admits there were issues in last year's election.

JAMIE LOO
Tribune Staff Writer

SOUTH BEND -- The St. Joseph County Election Board is making no apologies for the way write-in ballots were handled in November's election.

But Election Board Chairman James Korpal said the board, acknowledging there were problems with write-in ballots at polling places, will plan on a different system this year.

Korpal said write-in ballots will be processed into the same box as other ballots and will be separated and counted by hand in the 2008 elections.

Members of the St. Joseph Valley Greens asked the Election Board on Tuesday to apologize for discrepancies during the November municipal election.

The Green Party alleges legal write-in votes were not counted properly and that voters' privacy was violated in a variety of ways, including poll workers asking voters if they were casting a write-in vote and tallying those votes on a sheet visible to the public.

Karl Hardy, who was a write-in candidate for South Bend Common Council at-large, said the Greens realize elections are complex to run, but the fact that Green candidates were credited with fewer votes than electronic tallies of write-ins, along with the numerous reports of violations, support their case.

Hardy said there's evidence votes for him and write-in candidates Tom Brown and David Vollrath were not attributed to each of them as intended.

"This isn't about playing gotcha or singling anybody out," he said. "All we are asking for is an apology and acknowledgment that these problems did occur and that accountability lies with the county election board as public officials."

Korpal said the board did everything it could to train poll workers on how to handle write-in votes, posting notices on the machines and leaving instructions at polling places.

The only way to prevent this from happening in the future, he said, is to feed all ballots through the machines and open the boxes to count the write-in ballots by hand. Those ballots would be tallied and placed back into the box.

"The (poll) workers aren't going to like that ... but that's too bad," Korpal said. "We tried something that we thought was feasible, but obviously it didn't work."

Board member Murray Winn also acknowledged that poll workers didn't follow training instructions and agreed with using the hand count method this year. Winn also noted that write-in ballots are not always filled out correctly and that the machine numbers and hand counts will not always match perfectly if a name isn't written next to the write-in oval on ballots.

Hardy also suggested the county buy diverters for voting machines, which would divert write-in ballots into a separate bin after the ballot is fed into the machine.

Korpal said it wouldn't be fiscally responsible to ask the County Commissioners for diverters. Even with this technology, Winn said, the ballots still have to be separated and counted by hand for each write-in.

After the meeting, Hardy said he is happy steps are being taken to ensure votes will be counted this year but the board is still sidestepping its responsibility. People in the county "deserve to have accountability for the conduct of elections," he said.

County resident Robin Beck said voters have the right to privacy and the board should have at least apologized to residents for that breach.

"This is something everyone should be concerned about," Hardy said. "This is our democratic process that we're talking about here."

Staff writer Jamie Loo: