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« on: November 25, 2008, 05:55:21 AM » |
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Blank Ballot, and Flurry of Confusion in New Paltz
By ERIN QUINN
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — After elections nowadays, there always seem to be difficult and hotly contested recounts and hard-to-read ballots that must be painstakingly examined. But the one that took place in this left-leaning college town of 12,000 in the Hudson Valley might have been the most colorful.
Because of a missed deadline, none of the three candidates running for a seat on the town board appeared on the official ballot. That meant voters had to scribble in the name of their choice, and that set off all manner of problems.
Illegible handwriting was certainly one, but there was also an unexpected headache: Some voters accidentally wrote their candidate’s name on the plastic window of the voting machine instead of on the paper underneath.
In the end, it was not until Wednesday that weary elections officials were finally able to declare a victor.
The contenders for the seat were Jeff Logan, 45, a nurse who is also a triathlete; Bob Hughes, 67, also a nurse, and an environmentalist; and Brittany Turner, 26, whose campaign promises included one to block an effort to move up the closing hour for bars to 2 a.m. from 4 a.m., and who was arrested and charged with drunken driving shortly before the election. The write-in campaign began only after the leader of the New Paltz Democratic committee failed to mail in Mr. Logan’s petition on time to the Board of Elections.
So Mr. Logan, the scion of an old Democratic New Paltz family, was forced to start a write-in campaign to secure what had been expected to be a shoo-in vote, since he was running unopposed. “Great,” he said in an interview at the time. “After winning a caucus against three other candidates I now get to be a write-in vote along with people’s dogs and Mickey Mouse. I’m thrilled!”
Once word got out that the one-year seat on the board was up for grabs in this rabidly politically active town, Mr. Logan was immediately challenged by Mr. Hughes, a fellow Democrat.
With two Democrats vying for votes, Ms. Turner, a Green Party member and former New Paltz village clerk, decided only days before the election to throw her hat into the write-in ring. That earned her a “spoiler” badge which, as a third-party activist, she wore with pride.
Ms. Turner declined to comment on the drunken-driving charge because her case is still pending in court.
With no names appearing on the ballot, all three candidates coached voters on how to write them in on Facebook, YouTube and the local public-access television channel, and through mailings, homemade lawn signs and voting-booth demonstrations.
Election Day started out with a 20-minute wait for voters in one district when a machine ran out of paper for the write-ins. “You’d think that they would have put in a full roll of paper knowing that New Paltz had a huge write-in campaign going,” said Fawn Tantillo, a veteran election worker.
Then election workers discovered that several voters had written their candidate’s name on the plastic window of the voting machines rather than on the paper underneath, prompting almost continuous scrub-downs of the machines during polling hours.
Rich Steffens, an Election Day worker and real estate agent, said he had seen several voters who became confused over the write-in process inside the booth and threw the lever that opens the curtain to ask for help, accidentally casting their ballots before scribbling a choice for the town board position. “They then found out that they had just cast their vote, or cast a nonvote,” Mr. Steffens said. “And they weren’t happy.”
Writing utensils became an issue as well. Some of Ms. Turner’s supporters were chastised by poll workers for bringing in the pink pencils with her name on them that she was handing out in front of the polling site on the SUNY New Paltz campus.
One woman was told to put away the pen she was holding with a miniature doll on the end because they thought it was a depiction of Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate. “It was my 3-year-old’s Dorothy marker from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” said the woman, Liz Pickett.
Despite these challenges, one in six voters who went to the polls managed to write in the local candidate of their choice for the town board seat, election officials said.
Once the polls were closed, fatigued election workers had to roll out and examine six-foot-long sheets of paper, tallying about 1,250 write-ins, trying to determine illegible writing and questioning whether a vote was valid if the candidate’s name was spelled wrong — not to mention having to record the handful of votes for Santa Claus, the town librarian, a Republican who was not seeking the seat, and those who voted for themselves.
It was a long night, and it ended with Mr. Logan being named the preliminary winner, by 29 votes. After a painstaking count of hundreds of provisional and absentee ballots in a crowded, windowless conference room at the Ulster Board of Elections in Kingston, Mr. Logan was declared the official winner on Wednesday.
He received 519 write-in votes, compared with 487 for Mr. Hughes and 122 for Ms. Turner.
“Yes, it was a frustrating and unnecessary process,” Mr. Logan said. “But this is New Paltz, and I love the fact that we were able to pull off a successful write-in campaign that determined a winner.
“And I’m happy that winner was me.”
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