NWA EDITORIAL: Making votes count

Missed ballots disconcerting, but no reason for panic

When it comes to casting a ballot, our vote is for this: The conduct of an election should always and forever be perfect, never subject to human fallibility.

As the Nov. 6 election demonstrates to all voters, we almost never get everything we want.

What’s the point?

A slip-up that missed 800 votes in Benton County shows why the vote-counting procedure is a 10-day process, not a one-night exercise.

As general elections go, the ballot-casting in Northwest Arkansas went pretty well for these midterm congressional races and contests for state, county and local offices. The machines worked the way they were supposed to. The sheer size of the turnout created the occasional long wait, but the collection of people's votes went smoothly.

Here's the tricky part: It's not just the collection of people's votes that matter. The counting is a pretty important part, too.

In Benton County, that's where a hiccup came in. Or, from the perspective of some observers, it was more like a major heart attack.

The Benton County Election Commission and its staff failed to count one entire vote center's Election Day votes the evening of the election, when pulses are racing and people are ready for the results at 7:31 p.m., which is precisely one minute after the vote centers close. Candidates and their supporters, the news media, party officials and members of the public are often at so-called "watch parties" ready to cheer or to console one another, depending on the outcome of certain races. Television reporters are champing at the bit for vote counts so the talking heads back at the anchor desk don't have to keep repeating themselves or so watch party reporters can say something other than "the room is filled with anticipation" while name-dropping their sighting of candidates busy shaking hands and kissing babies at the gathering.

The pressure is on, in other words. The worst nightmare for election officials, after so many months of planning, is to have something go wrong that raises questions about a process so vital to our representative government. Such mistakes create that pit-in-the-stomach feeling, like when a quarterback throws an interception that the other team runs back for the game-winning touchdown. We haven't met an election coordinator or election commission yet that doesn't take the job seriously.

But missing votes? Democrat Christie Craig noticed one polling place within the Arkansas House of Representative district she had hoped to win appeared to have seriously low voter turnout for the election. She started crunching numbers. It didn't feel right. Craig got no where near beating the incumbent and nothing would change that, but she thought it was worth checking into.

It was. The election commission missed counting more than 800 votes the night of the election.

That's eye-popping and it unnerved some residents. But it's also exactly the kind of glitch that shows why the numbers delivered by election commissions across the state on election night are not official election results.

The actual process of formalizing election results takes days. The numbers are checked and cross-checked. The process is designed to ferret out discrepancies such as 834 votes being missed.

Craig pounced on a discrepancy she noticed in her district. The election commission has a slower process and must evaluate the election from across the county. We have no doubt the process that has worked well for years would have revealed the missed votes and triggered the search for answers.

What was the answer? Unfortunately, it was as simple and disturbing as this: A thumb drive -- a tiny, password-encrypted portable memory bank that carries the data from each vote center -- was left in a bag when it should have been pulled out and used for tallying ballots. Election officials found it inside the bag the next day, after Craig contacted them.

As confident as we are the discrepancy would have been found and accurately reported at the time of certification, it is still disheartening that a thumb drive would be so easily overlooked. Counting them isn't such a significant chore. That disturbed several people who showed up at last Friday's election commission meeting wanting answers and assurances it would never happen. It didn't make things any better that the affected polling site was expected to draw quite a few Latino voters. Given suspicions of voter suppression reported elsewhere, let's just say a few conclusions were jumped to.

We don't let the election commission off the hook. They're responsible for running an efficient and effective system of collecting and counting votes. They messed up. Experience is the best teacher, and we suspect this will deliver serious lessons about how to shore up the Benton County election system. It should.

Fortunately, the found votes had no significant impact on the outcome of any races. But that's beyond the point.

The three-member commission that runs elections in Benton County isn't unlike similar panels in the 74 other counties in Arkansas: They work hard to put on elections using machines picked by the state and overlapped political boundaries that often resemble the outlines of a plate of spaghetti requiring dozens of individual ballots. Anyone who believes it's a simple task should attend some election commission meetings and learn better.

The commissions know, or should know, that a mistake as significant as this one will raise a ruckus, and those expressing concerns are hardly out of order. The error should certainly serve as fuel for keeping a closer eye on the details of the Election Day processes.

We suspect it will, among commissioners and among the public.

Commentary on 11/14/2018

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