Tom Dernoga looked across the table Tuesday morning at the head of the Prince George’s County Board of Elections and posed a simple question to begin the hearing.
“You’re finished, right?” Dernoga, chairman of the County Council, asked about tallying vote totals.
It was not an unreasonable question for Robert J. Antonetti Sr., the county’s interim elections administrator. Counting all of the ballots cast by Prince George’s voters in the Sept. 12 primary took the county’s elections board almost two weeks as they sought out missing data cards and sometimes missing voting machines.
“Everything is finished,” Antonetti told Dernoga, D-District 1, from Laurel.
For nearly the next two hours, various council members quizzed Antonetti on how and why the primary elections fell apart and what could be done to prevent the same happening from during the Nov. 7 general election.
Antonetti cited inadequate staffing, both full-time and for election day, and said the board still needs about 980 more employees to reach the goal of having 2,800 temporary workers to staff the county’s 206 precincts come election day.
“We’re looking for 250 technicians at this point,” Antonetti said, who repeatedly beseeched the council to send the names and addresses of potential election workers his way. “We need judges.”
Antonetti also told council members that the primary election’s delayed poll openings, ballot troubles and counting woes stemmed from both state and local shortcomings.
The state was late in getting electronic voter check-in systems to the county, Antonetti said, so election workers had very little time to train on the new technology.
But the discussion returned again and again to Antonetti’s management of personnel issues.
Some judges called it quits after the polls closed and left without transmitting data or even removing vote information from the machines. Others never showed up to begin with.
“What can we do if people won’t work for $125?” Antonetti said.
David Harrington, D-District 5, of Bladensburg, said he saw a tremendous staffing problem and questioned whether Antonetti had tried hiring college students to work the polls.
“I can tell you right now, if you ask a college student and you paid them well, they’ll miss class,” Harrington said.
Council administrator, Craig Price, suggested diverting county workers to staff the polls that day.
“I think they’d have to go work wherever we directed them to work,” Price said.
As he left the Upper Marlboro county meeting room, Antonetti said they’d reconsider where to place workers if they couldn’t get enough by the general election.
“We’ll do what we have to,” he said.
