Flawed ballots spur second Colfax mailing

Voters in the Colfax School District last week received new ballots for the school’s levy request after the county auditor’s office discovered the original ballots, sent out two weeks ago, contained incorrect information about the school’s levy request.

The original ballots listed the wrong figure for the 2012 levy proposal. Colfax school district requested a levy proposal which asked voters to approve a $1,300,000 special levy for 2011 and a $1,350,000 levy for 2012.

Auditor Eunice Coker stressed the error was made by her office when election staff prepared the 2,451 ballots. They received the correct information from the school district.

The error was caught by a resident who noticed a discrepancy between what their ballot said for the 2012 amount and the amount listed on a flier mailed out by Citizens for Quality Schools, a group which is supporting the levy request.

Coker included a letter of explanation with the correct ballots in the second round of mail. The second round of ballots also included stamped return envelopes so voters who had sent in the original ballots would not face the costs of mailing a second ballot.

“We took every possible step to make sure that we would have an election to tally where there would be no challenge to the results,” Coker said.

Because there was no time to send out for new official ballots, elections staff prepared the replacement ballots on paper stock. Because of that, they will not be able to run the ballots through the electronic tally machines and will have to count the ballots by hand.

The return stamps added $1,078 to election costs. Coker said the overall cost of the second round of ballots could not be determined until the election is complete.

The additional costs will be taken out of Coker’s budget.

But that’s a cost, she said, that was worth incurring. Without those measures it would have been possible for someone to declare the election flawed and call for another election in April.

Coker attributed the oversight to stress on her elections department.

She said she is short-staffed because of the county’s budget constraints, and the workload on the elections department left the door open for the error.

“We don’t have as a county the staff or the money to hire the staff we need,” Coker said.

The elections department is made of two full-time employees. Part-time employees are hired to help process elections.

The return of the original round of ballots is being put in sealed bins in the elections office and will be preserved in case they have to be checked in a subsequent dispute, said Coker.

“I think we’ve really had a good, honest election because we made the extra effort,” said Coker.

So thorough was their effort that some voters received more than just one replacement ballot.

Harold Herman Friday brought a pair of replacement ballots into the auditor’s office to find out which one he should use.

“Somebody told me I should vote yes on one of them and no on the other,” he said.

Herman was concerned that the system opened up the election to a series of double votes.

“Oh, what a week we’re having,” Coker told him.

After receiving a general explanation from Coker, who offered to throw away the correct ballot, Herman went to the elections processing center for a full explanation of security checks from Karen Bafus, elections technician.

Herman had recently moved, and spelled out his full middle name when he changed his registration instead of using his customary initial. Because of that, he had two registration listings, with one marked as pending. The pending listing would be removed when the discrepancy between the two listings was cleared up, Bafus said.

Bafus explained that the elections department had to use a separate database to issue the replacement ballots in order to keep them separate from the original, incorrect ballots.

The original ballots included a bar code which was put on by the machine. The replacement ballots had no bar codes.

The list of voters for the re-issue was taken from the county’s list of active voters, instead of the database prepared especially for the Feb. 9 election.

When staffers entered either of the two replacement ballots into the system, said Bafus, the system would have told them to set it aside for the canvas board to clear up the differences.

“Mr. Herman did the right thing to come in,” said Coker. “It’s why the system is set up. The system works. His situation was corrected.”

Still, receiving multiple ballots left Herman feeling ill at ease.

“It sure seems like we didn’t have these kind of problems when there were a couple of old ladies with a big book,” said Herman.

The Colfax district ballots were among 6,686 mailed out to voters for the Feb. 9 election which includes special levy proposals in eight other districts around the county.