Snafu. Screw-up. Dysfunction. Meltdown. Pick whatever term best suits the utter chaos that defined the balloting Tuesday in Cook County.
City and county election officials poured $50 million into new voting equipment to replace the old punch card systems, which had been blamed for so much voter confusion in the 2000 presidential election. (While all the focus was on Florida, more than 120,000 ballots in Chicago and suburban Cook County that year didn’t register a vote for president.)
Tuesday marked the Cook County debut of the hybrid system of optical scan and ATM-like touch-screen voting machines that was supposed to make voting easier.
Officials warned that glitches were likely. What a quaint notion that turned out to be.
Machines were programmed incorrectly. Some were sent out with parts missing. Some had power cords that were too short to reach the nearest outlet. Election judges were expected to follow a complex, multipage manual of instructions for running and closing polls–but were given little or no preparation. Some had training for up to three hours. But some didn’t lay hands on the machines they were in charge of until primary day.
The worst problems began when polls closed. A cellular system to transmit results from more than 3,000 polling places to central counting centers had widespread failure. On the fly, officials ordered precincts to give up on the balky transmissions, pluck the data cartridges out of voting machines and send them to the central office for processing. Many were shipped by taxicab.
When talk surfaced Tuesday night about ballots being AWOL, candidates in the close race for Cook County Board president started suspecting the worst.
They suspected vote fraud. And why not, considering the long and sordid history of election shenanigans in Cook County? It turns out, fortunately, that those suspicions were groundless.
The kind of chaos experienced Tuesday night can’t be repeated. It invites distrust, suspicion and cynicism.
There’s no excuse for Tuesday’s failures. Neighboring counties have shifted to new voting technology without such complete chaos. Lake County’s shift to optical-scan machines in 2001 got rave reviews the first time out.
Elections in suburban Cook County are run by County Clerk David Orr. The show in the city is run by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, with attorney Langdon Neal as chairman. The mandate for change wasn’t thrust on them recently. They’ve had years to prepare.
This needs a lot of scrutiny. Why was this equipment used? How were the contracts let? Why was the preparation so shoddy?
And while we’re asking questions: Why do we have two election boards in Cook County? Because we’ve always done it that way? Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley has suggested that merging the Chicago and Cook County election agencies would save a lot of money.
This was a low-turnout primary election. It should have been an easy test for the new ballot procedures. Far more people will vote in the general election.
Orr, Neal and the others in charge of elections have seven months to fix it–or we’ll be counting November ballots into 2007.
