Problems included wrong-size ballots, dried-up pens and shortage of ballots. Results announcements were also delayed.
Onondaga County Republican Commissioner Helen Kiggins demonstrated the county's new voting machines in 2009. Kiggins this morning gave the machines a C in their countywide debut Tuesday. Syracuse, NY – Onondaga County’s first all- paper-ballot election was rocky enough to merit no more than a C from the county’s Republican election commissioner.
Tuesday’s primary revealed problems with the county's new ImageCast voting system ranging from the quality of ballots and marking pens to delays announcing the results, Commissioner Helen Kiggins said. The issues will be worked out in time for November’s general election, she said.
Still, the primary exposed no major flaws and Kiggins, who initially graded the day a C-minus, bumped up the grade after taking a last review of events and praising the efforts of the Board of Elections staff.
“We can definitely improve,” she said.
The board, which introduced its new paper-and-scanner replacements for lever machines in selected election districts last year, equipped every district with them for the primary, as required by law. Voters were asked to mark their choices on pre-printed ballots and deposit the ballots into a machine that scanned them and tallied the votes.
Kiggins said these problems surfaced:
- Ballot size – The Republican ballots provided to voters in Salina’s 14th district were too big to be scanned. That meant those ballots were not tallied Tuesday night. But the votes cast on them still count. The ballots were brought to the board of Elections will be counted next week, Kiggins said.
- Spoiled ballots – Election officials printed more ballots than needed for each district, figuring some voters would mess up their first one and need a replacement. But more ballots got spoiled than they expected, Kiggins said.
- At one point in one district, she said, voters had spoiled 14 ballots and cast 20 good ones. In another district in Syracuse’s 19th ward, an inspector spilled coffee on blank ballots prepared for the Republican and Conservative races, forcing the board to come up with replacements.
- Ballot legibility – Some voters complained that the oval-shaped bubbles that they needed to fill in weren’t dark enough, making their ballots hard to mark.
- Marking pens – some of the gel pens the board supplied to voters dried up between the time they were purchased and Primary Day.
- Reporting delays – Election returns didn't start going out until well after 10 p.m.
In the old days, the Board of Elections staffed a 50-person phone bank that took results called in from each election district and relayed them to computer operators who would enter the numbers for tabulation and publication.
The new ImageCast machines count the votes and store the data on memory cards. When the polls closed Tuesday, inspectors drove the cards to the Board of Elections’ warehouse on Thompson Road.
Returns from the last three town, Fabius, Tully and Otisco, came in by 11:30 p.m., not much later than the last result under the old system, Kiggins said.
But it also took longer for the first results to be posted on the Internet, she said.
Those returns came in about 9:45 p.m. – again, about the same time as they would under the old system – and were uploaded without a hitch. But a software issue kept the Board of Elections computer from transmitting the returns to the computer that was to put the numbers on the Internet. County information technology workers fixed the bug, but as a result the first returns didn’t get published until about 10:15 p.m., Kiggins said.
“Once they figured out what the problem was they got it current and then we were updating I think every five to six minutes,” Kiggins said.
That problem aside, board officials like the tabulating new procedure, she said. It eliminates the need to find staff for the phone bank and eliminates the clerical errors that used to occur in retrieving the vote totals from the lever machines and calling them into the board, she said.
Kiggins said board officials want to learn about problems voters encountered and their suggestions for improvements. Comments can be emailed to elections@ongov.net or mailed to the Board of Elections, Civic Center 15th floor, 421 Montgomery St., Syracuse, NY 13202.
“We probably can’t get back to everybody but we’d welcome comments,” Kiggins said.