November 5, 2004

Suburbs were busiest, even with more machines
By Geoff Dutton

As seasoned voters in many of Columbus's predominantly black neighborhoods waited in long lines Tuesday, they quickly recognized that  the crush of new voters wasn't the sole cause of congestion.  There also were fewer voting machines. Many voters complained of poor planning by elections officials ���Ǩ��� or worse. In fact, many  polling places in inner-city neighborhoods had fewer voting machines than during the last presidential election. Even so, the busiest places to vote as measured by the number of ballots cast per machine were overwhelmingly in suburban areas, according to an analysis by The Dispatch.

With aggressive voter-registration drives and near-record turnout  countywide and roughly the same number of voting machines as four years ago long lines formed nearly everywhere at times. In deploying voting machines, elections officials were forced to anticipate voting patterns in an unusually unpredictable presidential election, without enough machines to avoid widespread congestion at the polls. Nearly half of Franklin County's 146 wards had fewer machines than four years ago. Generally, the machines were shifted from city wards to suburban ones, following population swings. "We have the same number of machines, but they had to be spread over more precincts," Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said. If balancing the demand for voting machines was the goal, elections officials had mixed success.  Some wards saw an average of 56 votes cast per machine. Others recorded an average of more than 200 votes per machine. Countywide, wards averaged 170 ballots cast per machine. If each voter took an average of five minutes behind the curtain, it would take more than 14 hours for one machine to handle 170 voters. That's an hour longer than polls were open. Each ward is typically made up of about five precinct polling places.

There appeared to be little geographic pattern to the imbalances in voting-machine activity, except that most of the busiest machines were scattered around the Outerbelt and in suburban areas. All precincts use electronic voting machines. The most-used machines, for example, were in a ward in the New Albany-Plain Local school district, where the last vote was cast after 1 a.m. In the southeastern part of the county, long > lines greeted predominantly white voters at World Harvest Church. "Some folks thought we had, on purpose, shorted the polling places in the inner city, but at World Harvest Church, they had 12 to 15 machines and they voted past 11 o'clock," said William Anthony Jr., chairman of the board of elections. In some other parts of Ohio, officials deployed additional voting machines to handle the crowds.

In Summit County, which includes Akron, voting machines averaged 86 ballots about half the volume as in Franklin County. In Cuyahoga County, an average of 68 ballots were cast per machine. Both counties use punch-card ballots. Summit County aims to have one machine per 100 registered voters. "That's our standard," Elections Director Bryan Williams said. To meet the goal, Summit rented 600 additional machines for Tuesday, and pulled 500 more out of storage. The longest lines in Summit were about 90 minutes, he said. Many lines when there were lines were much shorter. Franklin County voters waited up to five hours to vote in some precinct.

As the line stalled in the Livingston Elementary School library,  50-year-old Darlene Harris couldn't help but notice one fewer voting machine. "They knew four years ago we were going to vote. They should have been prepared," she said. Fifty minutes after the poll closed, with at least 60 people still in line, elections officials delivered a fourth machine to the South Side precinct. Williams said the number of poll workers, and their skill, can be as critical to keeping lines moving as the number of machines. "The lines are determined by the quality of your booth workers," he said. Cuyahoga County purchased 600 extra machines, which it deployed throughout the day as it received reports of congestion. The longest lines were about an hour, according to elections coordinator Jacqui Maiden. "I don't know what would have been enough Tuesday," she said. Plans to buy new machines in Franklin County have been slowed by delays and disagreements in setting statewide standards and doling out money under the federal Help America Vote Act, which was enacted after the controversial 2000 election. Franklin County isn't slated for new machines until 2005 or 2006. "It wouldn't have been wise to ask for money for something we were going to replace in two, three years," Damschroder said. Aaron Epstein, a poll observer for the Franklin County Democratic Party, said > the flood of inexperienced and first-time voters also slowed the > process.

The ballot in every precinct was packed with candidates and issues more than 40 on Columbus ballots. Also, for the first time, large numbers of voters who didn't appear on the rolls cast provisional ballots. Those ballots are set aside until after the election to give officials time to verify the voter's eligibility. "The biggest source of congestion was the provisional ballot," Epstein said. "It took at least twice as long to vote on a provisional ballot." Franklin County hasn't announced the breakdown of where provisionals were cast, so it's unclear which polling places were hit the hardest. The League of Women Voters of Ohio, a nonpartisan voter advocacy group, noted that turnout, while high, didn't exceed predictions. "We all saw it coming," executive director Scott Britton said. "It just seems like there was a lot more that could have been done to prepare." There were an inadequate number of machines and well trained poll workers across the state, he said. Many frustrated, would-be voters "walked away without voting. I don't think we'll ever know how many there were."

Dorothy Stewart, 69, who has degenerative arthritis in the spine and  hips, was among them. On Election Day, she missed voting for the first time in almost 50 years because she could not stand in the long line at her North Side precinct. "The first president I voted for was Eisenhower. I have not missed one vote since, whether there is a state, local or national election," she said. "I was cut out (Tuesday). It really hurt me that I didn't get to vote." Discouraged by long lines, Dorothy Eloise Turner, 80, left her precinct at Finland Elementary School three times before she finally decided to stay. Turner, of Grove City, said when the 2�Ǭ�-hour wait started to strain her back, she persuaded other voters to let her go ahead of them.

"I wanted to wait with them because I don't know if I will be here for the next presidential election," she said. "In my whole lifetime, I never saw anything like I did (Tuesday)." Dispatch staff members Doug Haddix, Suzanne Hoholik, Jill Riepenhoff, Robert Vitale and > Sherri Williams contributed to this story.