Voting machine glitches may alter outcome

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — It's not Florida in 2004, when hanging chads and butterfly ballots in a handful of counties arguably swung the national election. But Gallup which held municipal elections Tuesday had its own problems, problems that have city officials wondering how accurate Tuesday's numbers really are.

City officials are focusing their attention on one of the ballot inititives, a minimum wage proposal placed on the ballot through a petition drive by the Gallup Committee for a Minimum Wage Increase. And they can't rule out the possibility just yet that the same problems that plagued that vote might have affected the candidate races either.

City Attorney George Kozeliski said election officials were tipped off that something might have gone wrong when three of the four districts on the north, south and west sides of town registered zero votes either for or against the minimum wage question, No. 1 on the ballot.

"For some reason, the scanners weren't picking up the votes," said Kozeliski.

According to last night's unofficial count from the city, the question ended the evening with 153 votes for and 113 against. Question No. 2 on the ballot, the City Council's alternative plan to raise the local minimum wage, reported votes in all four districts. It ended the evening with 1,865 votes for and 1,434 against.

Although the votes were cast electronically, the machines the city used, borrowed from the county, did leave a paper trail.

"So if worse comes to worse," Kozeliski said, "we'll just recount them."

If voters did in fact cast ballots for the committee's minimum wage plan in the three districts that registered no votes, it's hard to imagine them changing the outcome. In the one district that did register votes for the committee's plan and among the early voting and absentee ballots as well it got trounced by city council's alternative.

Committee member Bill Bright attributed the defeat to the deep pockets of the business community, which got behind the council's version and flooded local media with ads urging the public to "vote no on one, yes on two."

While Bright figures the committee spent no more than $1,200 pushing its plan, he bets the business community shelled out several times that.

"It's about money and lobbying by big business in America," he said.

Even so, Bright sees a silver lining in the committee's tentative defeat.

"The good news is we have a minimum wage increase, because the business community and the chamber of commerce were pressured into proposing their own plan," he said, "so in a sense we have a victory."

The potential computer glitch has a greater potential to swing some of the candidate races.

Kozeliski said he doubted they were affected. But since voters used the same machines to cast their electronic ballots for both the minimum wage proposals and the candidate races, the city can't be sure.

What makes the matter especially critical for the mayoral race is that front-runner Harry Mendoza is as of Tuesday evening only one vote away from having enough votes to avoid a runoff.

The city will be hosting a public meeting about Tuesday's voting at City Hall this afternoon at 1.