Misread ballots force election hand-count
First time voter Jessica Swatzell, 18, and Audrey Schmaltz, far,
fill out their ballots at the Gallup North side Fire Station on
Tuesday evening during the Gallup Municipal Election. Officials
are still working on election results, and may have to recount some
of the ballots this weekend. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]
By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer
GALLUP Talk about lost in translation.
City officials are blaming an error in Tuesday's elections that
may have affected the outcome of at least one race and a minimum
wage proposal on a ballot question that was improperly translated
to Spanish. Starting this morning, they'll be recounting some of
the ballots by hand to find the votes the machines missed.
According to City Clerk Patricia Holland, Question 1, which proposed
raising the local minimum wage to $7.50 an hour, did not include
the dollar figure in its Spanish version. The city caught the problem
before Tuesday, and ordered new ballots. But no one realized that
the change had shifted the position of the ovals people were required
to fill in to vote for or against the question. And because the
machines the city was using to scan the ballots weren't reprogrammed
to detect the new position of the ovals, they weren't counted.
City Attorney George Kozeliski said the change in Question 1 also
shifted the ovals in the race for municipal judge, between incumbent
Linda Padilla and challenger Anthony Dimas. According to Tuesday's
unofficial count, Padilla received 1,702 votes to Dimas' 1,507.
But because of the shift, Kozeliski said, some of the votes for
Padilla could have been counted for Dimas and vice versa.
Complicating the matter is the fact that some early and absentee
voters along with a few of the people who voted at Indian Hills
Elementary filled out the ballots with the translating error while
others filled out the new ones. And the city has no other way of
separating them but manually.
So, starting this morning at 8:30, inside the City Council Chambers,
poll workers will be recounting all early, absentee and District
2 ballots by hand.
Because none of the ballots with the translating error made it to
the other three districts, the city thinks it can reprogram the
scanning machines to read all the ovals correctly this time. If
the numbers for all the other races and ballot questions match up
with the numbers posted Tuesday, Kozeliski said, they'll know they
weren't affected. If they don't, he said, they'll probably end up
recounting all those ballots by hand as well.
"All we can do is assure people that whoever gets the most
votes is going to win," he said, "and if we have to sit
here all weekend and hand-count (the ballots), we're going to hand-count
them."
Dimas, who stands to gain a judgeship depending on how the recount
goes, said all the ballots should be hand-counted from the start.
Kozeliski said that will be up to the election's canvassing board.
Mayoral candidate Ralph Richards, who is still hanging in the race
since it's still not clear if front-runner Harry Mendoza has enough
votes to avoid a runoff, wondered if it wasn't time for the city
to throw out the result entirely.
"At what point do you call an election invalid?" he asked.
Holland said that option wasn't even on the table. While the machines
may have failed to scan the ballots correctly, the ballots themselves
were filled out properly and never compromised. At worst, she said,
they'd all be recounted by hand.
Meanwhile, the races for mayor and District 2 councilor also remain
undecided because of a few outstanding provisional ballots, the
ballots voters get to fill out if they don't show up on a polling
station's registry. If the city can prove they should have been
registered, or were registered somewhere else, the ballots counts.
If it can't, they're thrown out. Holland said there were between
five and eight such ballots in this election. They'll be counted
when the city does its hand-counting of the other ballots.
As it turns out, that's plenty to swing either race. Based on the
ballots counted so far, Mendoza fell just one vote short of winning
40 percent of the total votes cast and avoiding a runoff for mayor
against Richards, who finished second. In District 2, Roger Landovazo
avoided a runoff against Barbara Stanley by just six votes. The
provisional ballots could potentially change all that.
The results will be final no later than Monday afternoon. The city
has to have its official numbers in to the state by 5 p.m., even
if it means working through the weekend.
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Thursday
March 8, 2007
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