After a typo prompted the Pulaski County Election Commission to seek a $12,800 reprint of more than 50,000 ballots for the March 11 special election, commissioners approved new procedures Wednesday for making sure the ballots will work before ordering them from the printer.
Last week, commission workers discovered that the ballots ordered for the Pulaski Technical College millage election were unreadable for more than 100 of the county’s M100 voting machines, used in precincts.
The mistake occurred after a commission worker incorrectly typed a code that produces black boxes along the left side of the ballots. One box was omitted at the top of the “code channel,” which usually has two boxes, resulting in the machines being unable to read the ballots.
Commission workers also did not test the ballots in the precinct machines before ordering them, instead running them only through the commission office’s “more sensitive” voting machine - the M650.
On Wednesday, commission Director Bryan Poe presented his new procedures to the election commissioners.
Commission workers will now run the approved ballot through both the M650 and five to 10 randomly selected M100s, and Poe will review ballot coding before anything is ordered from the printer.
“We are going to work diligently to make sure nothing like this happens again,” Poe said.
The new procedures were drafted after the three-member board of commissioners voted at a regularly scheduled meeting Saturday to request that Poe create a plan to avoid such a mistake from happening again. Poe, who was not at the meeting, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Saturday that he already planned to implement code-channel proofreading and ballot-testing on both machines in future elections.
“After confirming that all ballot information, coding and targets are correct, and that both scanners are properly reading the ballots, the ballots will be ordered from the printer,” the final step of the procedure reads.
“Our recent mistake in ballot preparation has exposed the insufficiency of our current ballot proofing procedures,” Poe wrote in an email outlining the new procedures to commission workers Wednesday morning.
The board of commissioners approved the new procedures Tuesday by a vote of 3-0. Commissioner Phil Wyrick also asked that Poe review the ballot-checking process again to see if anything else could go wrong that hasn’t been addressed.
Commissioners expressed their confidence in Poe and the commission workers, but Wyrick added that the error couldn’t be overlooked.
“In hindsight, if you had run the ballot through the M100, you would have caught it,” Wyrick told Poe on Wednesday, adding that such a procedure was a “pretty simple thing to do.”
Poe said he and the commission workers believed the M100 was was less “sensitive” than the M650 and thus the M100 would read anything the M650 did. Poe told the board of commissioners that the commission has operated under this assumption for years and ran into a problem for the first time last week.
The mistake will delay the ballots’ arrival until Feb. 28 at the latest and will take an extra $12,800 out of the commission’s $400,000 printing budget this year. What the commission doesn’t spend in that printing budget goes back into the county’s general fund.
In the March 11 special election, Pulaski Tech is seeking a 1.9-mill increase to fund facility operations and capital projects. If approved, the millage increase would add $38 to the annual property-tax bill of a home valued at $100,000. Revenue expected to reach about $11.4 million would be collected beginning in 2015.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/20/2014