By the weekend before the election, the folks at the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections knew they had a problem. The length of this year’s ballot, one of the longest in recent memory, was too much for the electronic voting system used for early voting to handle. Normally, counting the votes cast on those machines is as simple as popping a cartridge out and feeding it into a reader. But this time, the readers couldn’t read them.
So they improvised. They’d have to use laptops to read the votes. But that would take hours for each cartridge. They got approval to start counting them early, but they quickly ran out of time.
As politicians waited for vote totals down at the Grady Cole Center on election night, the hours dragged on with nothing from the Board of Elections and the impatient toe tapping began. Across the state, they were waiting too, waiting on Mecklenburg’s voter data to call races up and down the ballot. In fact the whole nation was waiting, waiting to see who would control the US Senate and Congress.
So the folks down at the Board of Elections made a decision. They knew their numbers from early voting might be slightly off, but they posted them anyway. They figured they’d go back and recheck them the next day, and make changes before the results were certified. But by the time they came in the next day to start double-checking their totals, County Commissioner Ruth Samuelson’s campaign manager Brian Francis was already shouting from the rooftops that something was wrong. The numbers didn’t add up.
That’s the story that has been told and confirmed for me by two sources at the board. I hate “sources say” articles, and it’s killing me that I can’t name them, but I can’t. I can tell you this, though. While everything adds up now, the results still look, well, a little off to a lot of people.
Republican strategist John Aneralla says his confidence in the results began to plummet when he was told the board overrode the system during the process.
Though voters voted in similar partisan percentages on Election Day and during early voting, the results were different. Throw in the fact that a different type of voting machine was used on Election Day than for early voting, and people start to wonder.
In the early voting, during which about 91,400 people cast votes, John Kerry beat George Bush by 10,000 votes. About 12,000 more Democrats than Republicans cast ballots during early voting. But in the general election, where 234,000 people voted, and nearly 15,000 more Democrats then Republicans cast ballots, Kerry beat Bush by a mere 1,500 votes.
To pull off an early-voting margin of victory for Kerry that big, nearly every Democrat who voted would have had to cast ballots for him, a rarity in local politics. Perhaps the Democrats who voted early were more committed, but that still doesn’t explain what happened further down the ballot, where some Republican judges carried unusually high numbers of votes against Democratic opponents while Republican commissioners carried unusually low numbers of votes. Though judicial races are officially nonpartisan, the parties handed out cards telling voters which judges belonged to their party. Despite this, at the early voting site on Beatties Ford Road, a highly African-American, highly Democrat area, Todd Owens, an unknown white Republican, took a third of the vote against Avril Sisk, a well-known incumbent African-American judge. At the same site, George Bush got just 469 votes while Owens got 1118. Republican Judge Elizabeth Miller, who is white, got 1503 votes. But on Election Day, in solidly black, highly Democratic areas like precinct 16, Owens only pulled in 14 percent of the vote against Sisk, less than half of what he’d won in early voting.
Even more confusing is the fact that in regular Election Day voting, Democrat Parks Helms and Republicans Dan Ramirez and Samuelson won the at-large county commission race. But in early voting, three Democrats swept the same seats.
“It’s like looking at two different elections,” says Aneralla. There could be a dozen explanations for these trends, he adds, ticking off several. The Democrats way outspent and out-organized the Republicans, he admits. But he feels that still doesn’t fully explain the odd inconsistencies.
If the Republican Party could rule out bureaucratic mistakes, they could begin to take this election apart and see where they went wrong. So three days after the election, the party sent the board of elections a letter requesting to see copies of the early voting paper trail.
Since then, although they continue to call the board weekly, they’ve gotten nowhere. Creative Loafing’s own request for the same data two weeks ago so far has met the same fate — silence. Elections Board Director Michael Dickerson said the board didn’t provide the data to the party early on because they were busy recounting votes. That makes sense. But they’re certainly not busy now, and haven’t been busy for weeks.
It’s time they handed the information over, if for no other reason than to silence party brass whose doubts about the results of this election grow stronger with every brush-off they get.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2004.
