Incorrect ballot given to 400 in Benton County

Voters turn to paper to beat lines

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Long lines, a temporarily depleted supply of paper ballots and the distribution of wrong ballots to voters in Benton County were among election site glitches around the state Tuesday.

Kim Dennison, election coordinator in Benton County, said about 400 voters received wrong ballots at one precinct Tuesday morning before the problem was caught about 11 a.m.

“The ballot that was given out versus the ballotthey should have gotten affects the Bentonville aldermen races,” Dennison said.

“The voters should have gotten a city of Bentonville ballot, and they received a county ballot. So they were missing the aldermen races. I’m not sure where we are going with it from here. What is done is done. We can’t retrieve those ballots that have been cast.”

The problem occurred in an election with a heavy turnout of voters. Benton County has about 115,000 registered voters, almost 40,000 of whom partici-pated in early voting, Dennison said.

As for Tuesday at the county’s 57 voting locations: “From what we are getting back from our polling sites, there have been lines out the doors all day long since 7:30 this morning,” Dennison said at midafternoon.

The Benton County turnout was such that polling sites “pretty much countywide” ran out of paper ballots early in the day, Dennison also said.

“The longer lines we didn’t anticipate, and people were asking for paper ballots to get through the line a little quicker. The ballots went quicker than we thought they would,” she said, adding that extra ballots were being printed and distributed.

Elsewhere in the state, Lincoln County election officials called on the sheriff’s office Tuesday morning to escort a man out of the voting area in Gould Community Center who had refused to leave, said Gary Raney, Lincoln County Election Commission chairman.

Raney said the man was not arrested.

At the same polling place, one election official became angry and quit, Raney said, prompting county election workers to scramble late in the day to find someone to pick up ballots there.

Tim Humphries, legal counsel for the ArkansasBoard of Election Commissioners, said Tuesday that he routinely receives Election Day questions and complaints from voters and officials, but those calls this year were nothing that he considered to be out of the ordinary or major.

Some questions and complaints he had recorded dealt with voter-identification requirements and campaign signs in church yards.

Alex Reed, a spokesman for Secretary of State Mark Martin, was pleased at midafternoon with the state of the elections.

“Things are going great,” Reed said. “It’s high intensity, very high turnout.”

Arkansas has about 1.6 million registered voters. At least 440,000 participated in early voting that began Oct. 22.

Turnout was also heavy in Boone County.

“It is a madhouse,” Boone County Clerk Crystal Grady said. “We have lines everywhere.”

Voters early in the day were waiting 45 minutes to vote at the county’s polling site in Harrison, Grady said. The polling site was so busy that Grady took four additional electronic voting machines to the Harrison site, adding to the eight machines stationed there at the start of Election Day.

“Every polling site that I went to had lines of 20 to 30 people when they opened the doors,” she said.

Grady said the election turnout with early voting would exceed 50 percentbecause 9,000 of the county’s 18,000 active registered voters participated in early voting, she said.

In Crawford County, Kenneth Chitwood, chairman of the county’s Election Commission, described heavy turnout.

“They’ve been out the doors in a lot of places, which is unusual,” he said. “I’m tickled.”

Polling sites in Franklin County experienced some technical problems with electronic voting machines, some caused by polling site workers putting in flash memory cards the wrong way, by connectors coming loose and some paper jams, said De Anna Schmalz, county clerk.

“It was a pretty crazy morning,” Schmalz said. “We took care of it.”

Polling sites ran low on paper ballots, prompting the Scott County clerk’s office to take extra paper ballots from early voting out to the sites, said Keith Holleman, chairman of the Scott County Election Commission.

Voters in Scott County typically prefer the machines.

“It’s hard for me to imagine we would be running short of paper ballots,” Holleman said. “Usually we have hundreds left over. I don’t think that’s going to be the case today.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 11/07/2012