The Times Picayune

September 20, 2004

N.O. voting machine delays face La. inquiry
By Martha Carr

Still fuming over what he admits is the biggest election fiasco in modern Louisiana history, Secretary of State Fox McKeithen said Sunday that he will begin an inquiry today to determine why voting machines showed up late Saturday at 52 polling places in Orleans Parish, prohibiting hundreds if not thousands of voters from casting ballots.

With at least one candidate vowing to challenge the election, McKeithen said he hopes to have answers later today about why the election went so wrong in New Orleans.

McKeithen said he will meet with Attorney General Charles Foti this morning to begin a formal probe.

"I'm really distressed and upset with a lot of people," McKeithen said. "I promise you we are not going to have a repeat of this. We are going to find out who shot John."

Meanwhile, citizens angered that their voting rights were compromised have started organizing. One voter began a petition on the Web site PetitionSite.com. Others jammed Internet sites with their tales of frustration.

A group of lawyers including state Rep. Cheryl Gray, D-New Orleans, met to discuss filing a lawsuit on behalf of disenfranchised voters.

"We go off into other countries to fight wars about democracy and people's right to vote, and that was grossly violated yesterday," Gray said. "In my mind this is about protecting the process, not only for this election but for future elections in the city."

State Commissioner of Elections Wade Martin III said 90 precincts were affected, which combined have 58,134 registered voters. A total of 300,791 Orleans Parish residents are registered to vote, according to McKeithen's office.

Sandra Jenkins, a candidate for a Juvenile Court judgeship in Section C, said she knows of several supporters who were unable to vote because machines hadn't arrived. Jenkins missed the runoff by 267 votes, while lawyers David Bell and Yolanda King qualified for a runoff. A lawsuit is definitely an option, she said.

"It's too close," Jenkins said. "If I was 10 (percent) to 20 percent apart from Ms. King, I wouldn't say that. But I'm less than 1 percent away."

School Board candidate Deninah Webb-Goodwin says she could have won the 2nd District race outright if the machines had been there at 6 a.m. when the polls opened. Webb-Goodwin, who placed last with 5 percent of the vote, said she will file suit by Sept. 27 as required by state law.

"I'll take it to the Supreme Court and ask the Department of Justice to get involved if I have to," she said.

'It's unacceptable'

McKeithen said Sunday that he is not yet sure who is to blame, but admits the voting scandal is an embarrassment for the state, especially with the presidential election looming Nov. 2. If such a mistake were to occur on Election Day, Louisiana could find itself embroiled in a nationwide controversy not unlike Florida's ballot-counting scandal in 2000, he said.

"We're praised for having the best system in country, and here we have something like this happen," McKeithen said. "It's unacceptable."

The city's top elections official, Clerk of Orleans Parish Criminal Court Kimberly Williamson Butler, could not be reached Sunday. But on Saturday, Butler criticized McKeithen's decision to hold the election just days after residents were encouraged to evacuate because of Hurricane Ivan.

On Friday, when drivers were to deliver the machines, there was no one to receive the equipment, presumably because people had not returned from the evacuations, she said.

But McKeithen said all other parishes that evacuated for Ivan administered their elections without incident. He also said he made it clear to court clerks statewide that the election would go on unless the area suffered major damage, and he recommended they gather additional contact numbers for those responsible for polling sites, just to be sure.

"If it were me that had the responsibility, that's what I would have done," he said.

Besides blaming McKeithen, Butler pointed the finger at school officials for not having custodians present to open several polling places, and at state-contracted drivers for failing to show up Saturday to redeliver machines.

But an official with knowledge of Butler's office said the newly minted clerk of court herself may have contributed to many of the problems.

Since her election in November, Butler has replaced a good deal of the office's employees with new workers, most of whom have never run elections, the official said. She also has discontinued long-standing elections safeguards, such as having sheriff's deputies -- who are familiar with the city -- escort delivery truck drivers to all polling places, the official said.

Today Butler plans to hold a news conference on the election.

'Horrible problems'

Both McKeithen and Foti concede they had concerns about Saturday's election even before they learned about the missing machines.

McKeithen said he got word late last week that Butler could be short by as many as 100 commissioners to work the polls. So on Friday he took the extreme step of training 40 of his own staff members in Baton Rouge to be commissioners.

Once they were certified, McKeithen booked hotel rooms and sent his employees off to spend the night in New Orleans. They arrived at Butler's office Saturday at 5:15 a.m. to report for duty and were put to work, he said.

McKeithen also got word late Friday that several delivery people were unable to drop off voting machines to schools because they were locked.

"I called Superintendent (of Schools Tony) Amato," McKeithen said. "He put me in touch with the head of security, and I assumed the problem was rectified."

It wasn't.

On Saturday, after his state employees were sent to their polling locations, McKeithen decided to drive to the voting machine warehouse in New Orleans, which he had not visited before. When he arrived about 7:30 a.m., he was astounded.

"I saw a big pile of voting machines in the warehouse," he said. "I had no idea some polling places didn't have machines."

McKeithen said a supervisor with Covan World-Wide Moving, an Alabama company that holds the state delivery contract, told him that truck drivers had attempted to deliver the machines until about 3 a.m., when they asked for a break to eat and shower. None had returned.

After several failed attempts to contact Covan headquarters, McKeithen said he grabbed a map and began delivering machines himself. Later that day the company tried to have him arrested for stealing one of their trucks, he said.

"It was just a series of horrible problems that got worse as we went," he said.

Butler said the last voting machine left the warehouse Saturday at 3 p.m.

Now it is the state's job to determine what went wrong. McKeithen said parish clerks assume full responsibility for elections once voting machines are sealed, typically three to four days before an election. That means Butler will likely have to answer for many of Saturday's problems.

However, McKeithen and Foti declined to say whether any sanctions could be brought against Butler if she is found at fault. They did say they plan to review her role in the debacle, as well as that of the delivery company.

"I can assure the public that we will do whatever is necessary," McKeithen said. "I'm not going to try to avoid anything. Let the chips fall as they may."