D.C. election officials on Friday touted their success pulling off the presidential primary election despite myriad voter complaints of precincts running out of ballots, voting machines breaking down and lines running 100 people long.
Alice Miller, executive director of the Board of Elections and Ethics, told a D.C. Council committee that voters “were never at a disadvantage in their ability to vote.” When ballot supplies were exhausted or an optical scanner faltered, she said, the touch-screen machines at every precinct were available and used at record numbers, what Miller termed “yet another success.”
But at-large Councilwoman Carol Schwartz, chairwoman of the government operations committee, said the elections board should have been better prepared with surplus ballots, given the hype leading up to the Potomac primary. And the design of the paper ballots was “as clumsy and awful as anything I’ve ever seen,” Schwartz said, which led numerous optical scanners to jam.
She took Miller to task for claiming to have managed a successful election day when so many voters reported problems.
“When you start patting yourself on the back, I don’t like that, especially when there remains problems, because that’s your job,” Schwartz said. “I wouldn’t pat myself on the back unless we have a 100 percent success rate.”
About 117,000 D.C. voters turned out for the Potomac primary, nearly tripling the total from the 2004 election.
The number of ballots issued to each precinct was based largely on previous election day turnout. But about 10,000 ineligible voters showed up at the polls and “nonetheless insisted on voting,” Miller said. Roughly 900 percent more provisional ballots were issued Tuesday than the last primary, she said, draining the ballot supply.
Asked why the elections board failed to provide enough ballots at the onset, Miller said, “In the packing of the ballots, we can only fit so many in the box.”
To which Schwartz replied: “Then let’s get a bigger box.”
Dorothy Brizill, executive director of government watchdog DC Watch, said the board “should have been prepared.”
“We have been down this road many times in past elections, unfortunately,” she said.
