There's a strange election result in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. I check back on local politics to see who's winning city council races and the like, but last night when I went to bed there were still no results from Bloomington, despite all the other Indiana races being called.
This morning, the local paper explained why:
On Sunday afternoon, two days before the elections, Judith Smith-Ille, the lone Republican member of the county election board, informed Robbins and board Chairwoman Jan Ellis of Indiana Code 3-12-2-1, titled “Counting of Paper Ballot Votes.”That law requires hand tallying of paper ballots to be conducted in the polling sites by the polling place inspector and opposite party judge.
In the primaries, paper ballots were transported to the Justice Building to run through a high-speed digital scanner for quick results.
Those paper ballots were digitally scanned. The law is different for hand-counting, and apparently only one person on the election board was aware of it.
Since the state's electronic voting machines were recently decertified, Bloomington decided to use paper ballots to hold this small off-year election with mostly uncontested races.
Judith Smith-Ille, the sole Republican election board member, was the only one aware that the law for counting paper ballots required that they be counted in the precinct, knowledge which she deliberately concealed while she worked with the election board to plan an election which didn't comply with state standards.
Two days before the election, days after election workers were trained, she finally informed the rest of the election board of the law and that she intended to make sure they followed it. The entire vote-counting process would have to be replanned on the spot.
