Officials dispel rumors of election glitch

By BRENT SHRUM Western News Editor

Lincoln County officials are trying to dispel rumors of an Election Day glitch in the county's vote tabulating equipment.

At Tuesday's official canvass to certify the results of the election, the county commissioners, Clerk and Recorder Coral Cummings and employees in Cummings' office addressed the rumors and explained how the votes are counted.

Cummings opened the meeting - attended by a dozen people including state Rep. Ralph Heinert and Eileen Carney, who unsuccessfully challenged Heinert for his seat in the state House - by noting that while some counties in Montana had problems with registering voters on Election Day, Lincoln County had no such trouble. The state's computer system for voter registration was down for a short time on Election Day, Cummings said, but locally there were no problems associated with voters registering as late as 7:30 p.m.

"We did not have one provisional ballot all day long," Cummings said. "We were able to verify every late registrant."

The sole malfunction while votes were being counted was a brief power outage in the courthouse due to a circuit being overloaded, Cummings said. The outage occurred immediately after the ballots from the first precinct had been counted. When power was restored, the ballots from that precinct were recounted, and the tally was the same.

"Other than that we had no machine problems whatsoever," Cummings said.

Alvin Benitz asked how the tabulating machine turns over ballots. Election clerk Leigh Riggleman displayed a sample ballot and explained that each ballot is coded to tell the machine which precinct it belongs to, and that the machine's chip is programmed before the election to read all the positions on the ballots for each precinct. The machine is tested several times before the election - and again after the election - with sample ballots from each precinct to ensure all the positions for all the precincts are recognized. The results are checked by hand to make sure they match the test ballots.

"And if they don't - and thank goodness they always have - then we would have a problem," Riggleman said.

Benitz asked why hand recounts after elections always seem to yield different results. Cummings explained that in some cases votes that are rejected by the machine can be verified in a hand count to be for a particular candidate.

"Coral, the rumor that's going around - and I assume that's why people are here - is there's a glitch in our computer system," said Commissioner John Konzen.

"No, there isn't a glitch in the computer," Cummings said.

"So the individual who was watching that night, who thought there was a glitch in the system, he didn't understand?" Konzen asked.

Cummings said the person in question - who was not mentioned by name and who was apparently not present for the canvass - said things were done differently in the state where he lived previously and that Lincoln County is "behind the times" in its tabulation system. Cummings defended the system and said it suits the smaller scale of the county's elections.

Commissioner Rita Windom said some people may have read about problems with a vote tabulator in Kalispell and asked Cummings if the same machine is used in Lincoln County. Cummings said it is not.

George Wasco asked Cummings if the machine could somehow swap votes for Republican and Democratic candidates. She said the machine reads votes for particular candidates, not by party. Wasco then asked if the machine could misread votes when ballots switch from one precinct to another, and Cummings explained that every position in every precinct is tested before and after the election.

Wasco asked if there could have been a "glitch" in the chip after the power went out. County employee Glena Young said she helped test the machine after the election, and the test showed the machine was working properly. Wasco suggested that the "glitch" might have manifested itself only during the actual vote count and not during the later test, but Young expressed skepticism.

"So in other words, it had a glitch and then it fixed itself?" she asked.

Following the official canvass, candidates have five days to ask for a hand recount.

A recount is expected in the county treasurer's race, where Republican Nancy Trotter Sutton edged out Democratic incumbent Geri Miller by nine votes out of more than 7,000 cast. The margin was within the one-quarter of 1 percent under which state law allows for a recount at no charge to the candidate.

Miller has indicated that she will request a recount.

Any other candidate asking for a recount would be required to obtain a court order and post bond to cover expenses.