Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005
by Sean Sands
Staff Writer, The Gazette

With thousands of slips of paper organized in bins and boxes around her, Valerie Dant held out one pale orange scrap for scrutiny.

Dant, the chief election judge in Takoma Park’s municipal elections last week, had to make a decision: Was the ballot, which had an ‘‘X” in each of the boxes for the three mayoral candidates, a valid one? With a group of onlookers that included four other judges, three journalists, a representative from a candidate’s campaign and several members of the public watching, she declared the ballot void and counting promptly resumed.

It was a scenario repeated throughout the evening. Anytime the election judges pouring over the city’s paper ballots had a question, decisions were made with everyone watching.

‘‘I was quite struck by how empowering it was to be voting on paper, and I felt very good about watching the transparency of the vote-counting process,” said Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, a group advocating for verifiable paper audits in elections using electronic voting terminals. ‘‘There we all were — the public, the candidates, the press — and it was a completely open and observable process.”

Earlier this year, when the City Council approved the use of paper ballots for last week’s election, they had three goals, primary among them to protest the lack of a ‘‘paper trail” on the electronic machines used across the state.

Council members also hoped to save as much as $2,500 by foregoing the rental of the voting machines and the accompanying security while promoting civic involvement in the tallying process. By all accounts, using paper ballots was a success.

And as far as civic involvement, Schade had nothing but praise for the process, going so far as to call it therapeutic.

‘‘From my perspective, and I know a lot of people share this view, our democracy isn’t in the greatest of health,” she said. ‘‘The chicken soup of democracy is citizen participation, and that’s what we saw on election night in Takoma Park.”

After the polls in the Community Center’s Computer Learning Center closed at 8 p.m., representatives from the candidates’ campaigns watched as each ballot box was secured with padlocks and tamper-evident tape and then carried to the Community Center’s auditorium. Once there, judges opened the boxes and used a carefully scripted process to separate and organize the three-part ballots, showing the emptied containers to observers to demonstrate that all of the ballots were accounted for.

Once the counting began, observers were free to move from one table to the next, watching as one judge read the ballot aloud, another verified the vote was correct, a third recorded the vote on a tally sheet and a fourth verified the vote was recorded correctly. Unlike two years ago, when access to the room where electronic voting terminals tabulated the votes was restricted, anyone could walk into the room to watch the process.

Anytime a ballot was questioned — in one case, the name of what was presumed to be the voter was written across the bottom of the paper as if it were that of a candidate — the judges made their decision in front of the group of observers.

After the ballots in each race were counted, the chief judge oversaw a second hand-count of the ballots and then verified that number against the tally sheet to ensure accuracy.

‘‘Overall, I think the actual voting process went very well and it was quick — people were able to vote quickly,” said City Clerk Jessie Carpenter, who oversaw the entire elections process, beginning with last month’s nominating caucus. ‘‘I think it went very well, and I’ve heard good things from the observers who were there.

‘‘It took longer [to count the ballots] than I hoped it would, but I think there are some things we can do in the future,” she said, like starting the counting process sooner. ‘‘Overall, I think it was a really positive thing.”

There also were other complaints about the evening, however, as some residents expressed concern about the need to hide their ballots while walking from the voting booth to the ballot box to ensure privacy. Others said on citywide e-mail lists that the three-part paper ballot, printed on multi-colored paper specific to each ward, had a ‘‘sophomoric” appearance, like that in a middle school student council election.

‘‘I have no doubt that it was a fair election, and I think part of what helped build my confidence in the election is that whole process of hand-counting at the end,” said Councilman Terry Seamens, who spent most of the evening with his wife and residents of his Ward 4 watching the count. ‘‘It was very transparent, and it also was exciting to be part of the process and to watch the counting and to realize that if something had gone wrong, we would be the first to recognize it and know it.”

Seamens said the voting process seemed to move much more smoothly this year because of the ease of using paper ballots, though the amount of time the judges had to work — from the time polls opened at 7 a.m. to just before midnight when the election results were announced — seemed long. ‘‘I wonder if the solution to that wouldn’t be to have more election judges to do the counting after the polls closed,” he suggested.

‘‘I thought it all came out very positive,” Seamens said. ‘‘Again, I think the transparency was much higher with this, and I think the confidence of the community was much higher, and I also think Election Day ran much smoother with the paper ballot.”

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