On the evening of the Nov. 8 general election, polls closed at 7 p.m.
Then, an hour-and-a half later, workers in the Putnam County Board of Elections and Registration reported on the results of the early/advanced voting and the bulk of the absentee ballots.
Turns out, nearly 70 percent of the eventual 10,202 votes were certified this past Monday evening as having been cast.
After that, all the paperwork and packed-up equipment from the county’s five voting precincts came in quickly. By 10 p.m., the day’s vote totals had been reported to the Secretary of State’s office and folks began looking for the light switches.
By all accounts, the day had gone swimmingly well, especially considering the election was held under Georgia’s new 98-page voting procedures law. A few lines built up when the polls opened at 7 a.m., but after that, “smooth and steady” were the watchwords of the day for poll workers.
Voters knew how they were going to vote – and voted quickly. In and out in 20 minutes. No sighs.
No shuffling of feet. No studying the ceiling tiles.
Tim Vacula, poll manager at the Lakeside Baptist Church voting site on U.S. 441 South, even called it “pleasant.”
Yet, the election board’s final and official certification of the voting would not come for nearly a week. Two concepts are involved: speed and accuracy, and they don’t always work well together in a third idea – time.
Parts of the process simply take time.
Military and overseas citizens have an extra three days for their absentee ballots to arrive, but this year the third day was a holiday, followed by a weekend.
Likewise, a few “provisional” ballots are given the same three days for voters to correct omissions (e.g., lack of a photo ID, a mix-up in addresses used to assign a voting precinct, not signing the oath on an absentee envelope). And there is the occasional “clerical error,” which takes time to investigate and correct.
The elections board spent the better part of an hour Monday evening pouring over just 18 ballots, trying to decide whether to include them in the count. The first six were easy – military ballots received after election day, but with postmarks still having to be verified and ballots prepared for counting.
A couple of others had problems involving the state’s database – one woman was listed as deceased but was very much alive and well; another man (with the same first and last names as three others in the database) had been shifted to a county where he had never lived.
In the end, those two provisional votes were counted; another man was not because he failed to change his registration to Putnam County.
Another four absentee ballots had to go through the adjudication process – a Democrat and a Republican member of the board plus a staffer – to agree on the voter’s intent after the tabulation machine could not read the ballots. Instead of filling in the bubble, the voters had marked their ballots with an X or /.
In the end, one could have some sympathy for election officials in larger jurisdictions with different state laws, different voter habits, and populations dwarfing Putnam’s 22,000 citizens. For instance, Arizona’s huge Maricopa County – 4.5 million residents, half the state’s population – still had 260,000 ballots to count late Friday night. Probably not so pleasant.