Election Day Became a Nightmare,
As Usual, for Bernalillo County

Wall Street Journal December 15, 2000

By BRYAN GRULEY and CHIP CUMMINS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Robert Lucero couldn't believe the printouts. He tried again and again, but the vote counts wouldn't add up. As midnight neared on Tuesday, Nov. 7, the man who ran the election in Bernalillo County began to fear something had gone wrong.

Reporters and political-party officials kept calling him in his cluttered office in the county building downtown. "These numbers look a little funny, Robert," one caller said. Absentee- and early-voting tallies appeared to show that thousands of voters had cast ballots without bothering to vote for a presidential candidate.

I'm on it, Mr. Lucero told the callers. He knew what they were thinking: Bernalillo County has blown another election. He hunched over his computer, snacking on peanuts, running more printouts. He told himself he would have a final tally for the local morning newscasts.

It was Mr. Lucero's first presidential election as chief of Bernalillo County's elections bureau. He and his full-time staff of 20 had hired and trained more than 2,300 poll workers, arranged to have 1,100 voting machines installed at polling stations, and weathered an Election Day snowstorm. He himself had programmed the balloting system that now was giving him trouble. He thought he had done everything right.

Until that night. By the time Mr. Lucero left his office just before dawn, the county had withheld about 66,000 absentee and early ballots from its final tally. That placed in limbo the tight race between George W. Bush and Al Gore for New Mexico's five electoral votes. And, for Bernalillo County, it began three frantic and embarrassing days of recounting and second-guessing.

Most years, no one notices if elections are run by people who lack relevant experience or with voting machines that malfunction. This year, with a photo finish between Messrs. Bush and Gore, the whole country noticed. The fiasco in Florida, with a decisive 25 electoral votes at stake, received most of the attention. But the lesson America learned from the historic election of 2000 was that, from Palm Beach to Bernalillo, the nation's voting system is deeply dysfunctional.

If there's one key reason for the mess, it's the American tradition, going back two centuries, of delegating responsibility for running elections to the nation's 3,067 individual counties. Guided by few national standards, most of these local governments devote modest resources to elections and hire poorly trained staffs for the massive job of recording and counting a total of more than 100 million votes for president, as well as millions more for lower offices.

The result is a jumble of different technologies and methodologies -- an invitation to disaster. This year, there was chaos all over the country.

Typos and Blurry Faxes

In Iowa, a hard-to-read fax from Scott County caused election officials initially to give Vice President Gore an extra 2,006 votes. In Outagamie County, Wis., a typo in a tally sheet threw Mr. Bush hundreds of votes he hadn't won. And in Multnomah County, Ore., a new system under which voters could mail in or drop off ballots led to fears of misconduct, as unidentified people collected ballots from voters on the street in Portland during the Election Day rush. The mysterious ballot collectors put their haul in cardboard boxes and disappeared, witnesses said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ended the election drama with a proclamation that more recounting in Florida would violate the constitutional doctrine of "equal protection" because standards would vary from county to county. By that logic, the entire nation arguably engaged in an unconstitutional free-for-all on Election Day, as standards varied within and among many states.

The truth is that the enormous job of running accurate elections just isn't a high priority in most counties -- and it shows. With roads, parks, police, jails, sewers and other necessities to worry about, county governments typically allocate no more than 3% of their budgets to the clerk's office, says Jane Hague, president of the National Association of Counties and a member of the governing council of King County, Wash. A chunk of that is spent on filing and recording of public documents, leaving little money to keep voting machinery up-to-date, train poll workers adequately, or hire professionals experienced in running elections.

Most counties figure it's less of a risk to postpone buying voting equipment than "to have criminals on the street, backlogs in the courts, or overflowing jails," Ms. Hague says. Likewise, low salaries for election supervisors make it hard to attract top talent -- but until this year, that wasn't a problem many voters complained about.

In recent weeks, a movement has begun in Congress to make voting more modern and uniform. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, for example, has sponsored legislation to pay for research on the best voting methods. He and others are considering federal matching grants to fund nationwide improvements.

In Bernalillo (pronounced burn-uh-LEE-oh), New Mexico's most populous county, with the 530,000 residents of Albuquerque and surrounding areas, County Clerk Judy Woodward has presided over three elections in recent years marred by delays in counting absentee ballots. Even fellow Democrats have blasted her as incompetent, a charge she vehemently rejects. Critics point to high turnover in the clerk's office, where everyone agrees salaries are modest.

The current elections chief, Mr. Lucero, is 43 years old, a compact man with a cherubic face and short, dark hair dusted with gray. Prior to joining the office shortly before the 1998 general election, he had spent 22 years working in public and commercial television -- doing everything from writing scripts to appearing on camera -- and four years as an elected Albuquerque school-board member. His county job pays only $36,000 but lets him continue adding to the government pension he began accumulating while working in public TV. And it sounded fun. "The job really reminded me of television," he says. "You do everything." Formerly a registered Democrat, he dropped his party affiliation when he took the elections post.

After the polls closed on Election Day, Mr. Lucero pulled his gold Ford Astro minivan into the county building's parking lot. His rounds that day had included checking polling places and being interviewed on TV. A morning snowstorm hadn't hurt turnout much.

To record and count regular votes on Election Day, the county had used 1,100 bulky touch-screen machines made by Shoup Voting Solutions Inc. of Rosemont, Penn. The Shouptronics had performed well, even though many of the touch-screen units dated to the mid-1980s. The problematic absentee and early votes, by contrast, had been cast on paper ballots which were then fed into Accu-Vote optical-scanning machines sold by Global Election Systems Inc. of McKinney, Texas.

Now, around 8:30 p.m., Mr. Lucero took the credit-card-size memory chips that contained the absentee and early votes up to his sixth-floor office for tabulating. Local reporters and party workers were watching election returns in the county commission's meeting room, an amphitheater decorated with paintings of cowboys and grazing buffalo. Ms. Woodward, who is 73 years old and wears a silk scarf woven through her snow-and-ash-colored hair, busied herself with sandwiches for election workers, relishing a smooth Election Day. It looked like everything would be wrapped up once the absentee and early ballots were counted.

Crucial Ballots

The roughly 66,000 absentee and early ballots are crucial in Bernalillo, where this year they accounted for more than a third of the total votes cast for president. The county allows voters to vote early, and in person, during a 20-day period prior to election day, or to send in absentee ballots by mail. In neither case must voters assert that they will be out of the county on Election Day. Many states and counties have similarly liberalized voting rules in an effort to boost turnout.

Although Bernalillo County overall tends to favor Democrats, Republicans usually win more absentee and early votes because the GOP aggressively promotes these options. That's why state GOP Chairman John Dendahl was puzzled when the national TV networks projected Mr. Gore as the winner in New Mexico early in the evening of Nov. 7. "That's premature," he told fellow Republicans partying in the Marriott Hotel ballroom. The statewide race between Messrs. Gore and Bush was close, as expected. Mr. Gore had dominated regular polling in Bernalillo County, but the absentee and early votes were likely to help Gov. Bush of Texas.

Partial totals from absentee and early voting had been tacked to the wall of the cavernous warehouse south of downtown, where those categories of votes are counted. Reporters there were having trouble making sense of the returns. The paper tallies, resembling grocery-store receipts, seemed to show that many more ballots had been cast overall than were cast in individual races. For example, tallies later that night would show that, of about 38,000 early ballots cast, only 25,000 were cast for Mr. Gore or Mr. Bush.

Around 9 p.m., county computer staffers noticed the discrepancy and pulled the early-vote totals from the county Web site. Ms. Woodward took a call from a befuddled party official. "Judy," he said, "we have a little problem here."

A Glitch in the Count

It wasn't her only problem. She had just learned that poll workers at the vote-counting warehouse had been sent home, leaving about 1,800 ballots -- a combination of early and absentee -- to be counted the next day. These ballots had to be counted by hand because the Accu-Vote optical-scanning machines had refused to read them. The reasons for this glitch aren't clear. Some voters may have made stray pencil or pen marks that confused the scanners. Other people may have voted for two candidates in the same race or spilled coffee on their ballots.

Furious, Ms. Woodward telephoned Aggie Lopez, the absentee-voting supervisor. Only the county clerk could dismiss those workers, Ms. Woodward scolded her. "You should have kept them there."

"I'm sorry," Ms. Lopez said, "but the team was so tired." Only 57 of the 80 scheduled workers had shown up for the one-day, $6.50-an-hour assignment. Many were elderly, and the warehouse lighting was poor. Each ballot listed more than 30 races and issues, in English and Spanish. Three people were required to review the ballot during the hand count, a process that could take as long as five minutes for each ballot. Ms. Lopez told her boss she had sent workers home because she feared they might start making mistakes.

But Ms. Woodward was determined to get those votes counted immediately. In 1998, counting of absentee votes had been delayed a day after she allowed poll workers who hadn't finished their work to go home. Now, she went on radio and TV to plead that workers return to the warehouse.

A swarm of reporters gathered at the cinder block-and-stucco warehouse. A few workers did return, and Mr. Dendahl, the state GOP chairman, had collected some fellow Republicans to help count. But when Ms. Woodward arrived and assessed her meager manpower, she reluctantly decided it would be futile to try to finish counting that night.

It was nearly midnight, and local TV and radio stations were running a familiar story: Bernalillo County would be late.

Worse trouble was brewing back at the county building. Mr. Lucero had spent the evening feeding the memory cards containing the bulk of the absentee and early votes into his office computer and printing the results. He couldn't understand how such a gap could exist between the number of ballots cast and the number of votes for individual candidates.

The memory cards came from the 13 Accu-Vote scanners. The scanners, which resembles fax machines, had worked well in nearly a dozen elections since the county had purchased them for a total of $97,000 in 1997.

Ms. Woodward had once argued publicly for getting rid of the Shouptronic machines used for regular voting at all polling places on Election Day and instead conducting the entire county's election with paper ballots that would be counted by Accu-Vote scanners. She contended that the smaller Accu-Vote devices were cheaper to store and transport and were just as accurate as the Shouptronics. But she didn't formally propose the purchase of more Accu-Vote scanners because, she says, "the money just wasn't there."

So Bernalillo has operated with a mixture of voting machines, using the Accu-Vote devices solely for absentee and early ballots.

During election years, the county typically allots about 3% of its budget -- about $3 million this year -- to the clerk's office, which spends about half of that on election expenses. New Mexico counties can borrow at no interest from a state voting-equipment fund. But total lending by the fund is limited by law to $2 million for the whole state, not enough to help each of the 33 counties to buy new machines when they need them.

Ms. Woodward says she has worked diligently since being elected in 1992 to keep her budget tight. "The [state] legislature is what's looking at you," she says. "If they see you spend too much, they just think you're sloppy."

A Plea for Help

Back at the county building, the performance of the Accu-Vote machines was frustrating Mr. Lucero. It was clear that the computer program he had installed in those machines was flawed. He called technicians with the vendor, Global Election Systems, and begged them to e-mail him a fresh program, so he could re-run the memory cards. He desperately wanted to avoid spending another day having each ballot re-fed through the scanners.

The company technicians, who had more election experience than Mr. Lucero, pointed out to him that fiddling with the software now could invite charges of vote tampering. Anyway, even if they sent him a new program, the paper ballots would have to be fed through the machines again, one by one.

When Mr. Lucero returned to his one-story brick home for a shower at 5 a.m., he didn't know the Florida election had also been a squeaker. He hadn't been following the national returns. But he figured, based on his experience in TV, that local, and maybe national media would be clamoring for Bernalillo County's results. "It's going to be a long week." he told Shannon, his wife of 22 years.

Two hours later, he was back at his desk, without having slept. An election headline in that morning's Albuquerque Journal read, "Mistakes Lengthen the Wait." Mr. Lucero prepared to go before the county commission to accept responsibility. But he wasn't so sure it was all his fault.

Back in September, he had toiled in his office for four 14-hour days with Don Biszmaier, a Global Election technician. Together, they customized basic software provided by the company to fit Bernalillo County's needs. The resulting program would tell the Accu-Vote machines how to count the absentee and early ballots. The two men made no fewer than 114 versions of ballots to reflect a multitude of local races and issues in different parts of the county.

Did He Make the Click?

As they worked, Mr. Lucero's computer screen repeatedly displayed a command window offering a pull-down menu. From the menu, the two men should have clicked on "straight party." Either they didn't make the crucial click, or they did and the software failed to work. As a result, the Accu-Vote machines counted a straight-party vote as one ballot cast, but didn't distribute any votes to each of the individual party candidates.

To illustrate: If a voter filled in the oval for straight-party Democrat, the scanner would record one ballot cast but wouldn't allocate votes to Mr. Gore and other Democratic candidates.

While Mr. Lucero and Global Election officials agree this was the problem, they disagree about how it happened. Mr. Lucero, whose computer training consists of a few classes at the University of New Mexico, says he customized the program properly, but the software failed.

Frank Kaplan, Global Election's western-regional manager, says there wasn't a flaw with the company's basic software, but he can't explain what went wrong. (Mr. Biszmaier declined to be interviewed.) With 850 counties and municipalities across the country as customers, Global Election says it has kinks from time to time, but nobody has had software problems like those in Bernalillo County.

Whatever its origin, the error was detectable. Global Election explains to customers in written training material how to run a series of tests to make sure a program counts properly. These tests are vital, akin to a driver tapping the brakes after having them repaired, the company says.

An Important Admission

Mr. Lucero says he thoroughly tested the Accu-Vote machines and determined they were working properly. But he neglected to check the individual vote totals against the overall number of ballots cast. "I didn't do the math," he says.

No one checked Mr. Lucero's work. His supervisor, Deputy County Clerk Lena Gonzales, who attended a four-day training session with him at Global Election in Texas last spring, didn't look at the test results, she says. A retired school administrator who joined the clerk's office two years ago to supervise elections, she had no experience running a voting operation. She says she left everything concerning the Accu-Vote machines to Mr. Lucero.

The county employs 75 computer technicians, some of whom could have helped Mr. Lucero. He says he didn't seek their assistance because "they're [information-technology] people, not elections people."

Bob Ashmore, director of the county's information-technology department, says, "Robert was the one responsible for getting [the computer programming] done with the vendor, and he had a hundred other things to do." In the future, Mr. Ashmore says, his people will be more involved.

The day after Election Day, Mr. Lucero rewrote the computer program with help from Global Election, but it was midnight before a recount could start. At the urging of Ms. Woodward and Mr. Lucero, a local district judge, Theresa Baca, named a committee of observers, one each from the Republican, Democrat and Green parties. With the judge presiding, the panel spent a good part of the evening holed up in a conference room at the clerk's office. Fueled by coffee and pizza, they tested hundreds of sample ballots, doing the math Mr. Lucero had neglected weeks earlier. By the end of the night, they were satisfied that the problem had been fixed.

Recounting the Absentee Votes

The recount of the absentee and early votes began Thursday morning at the warehouse. Workers had hauled dozens of black-plastic ballot boxes out of storage and stacked them in the building's main room, among tables draped in stars-and-stripes tablecloths. Thirty poll workers, now in their third day on the job, sat in a row, feeding ballots through reprogrammed Accu-Vote machines.

Watching from a few steps away were Mr. Lucero and Ms. Woodward, District Judge Baca's committee, a phalanx of lawyers from both parties, two investigators from the state attorney general's office, and Ms. Lopez, the absentee-voting supervisor, with her two assistants. Yellow tape roped off a section where journalists listened to Mr. Dendahl, the state GOP chairman, rail at Ms. Woodward: "Once again, the county clerk and her machinery have distinguished themselves with incompetency." Ms. Woodward came over to the reporters to defend herself: "This glitch did not surface until all the ballots were counted. How we reacted shows competence."

Late that afternoon, most of the crowd left the warehouse and headed in a caravan of vehicles up Broadway to the county building. Sheriff's deputies escorted the Accu-Vote memory cards containing the recount of the 26,000 absentee votes. The observers and lawyers from all sides crammed into Mr. Lucero's small office. He ran the memory cards again, as he had on Tuesday night. This time, it worked.

All the votes were there, and all had been distributed properly to the candidates. Mr. Lucero felt momentarily relieved. And, as the Republicans had expected, Mr. Gore's statewide lead of about 10,000 narrowed to 6,800.

Turning to the Early Votes

Next came the recount of the 38,000 early votes. Around midnight, Ms. Baca, the district judge, and the others were back in Mr. Lucero's windowless office. Outside, local reporters were now joined by journalists from New York, Washington and Los Angeles, as the country remained uncertain about who would win the election.

At one point, Pat Rogers, a local attorney for the Republicans, asked that TV cameras be turned off for an important announcement. What county election officials had discovered, Mr. Rogers reported gravely, "was the Wen Ho Lee tapes." The reporters roared with laughter at the joking allusion to the Los Alamos, N.M., scientist whose missing tapes filled with sensitive nuclear weapons data have been the subject of an intensive Federal Bureau of Investigation search.

Inside, Mr. Lucero faced his PC. To his left stood a half-empty jar of peanuts, untouched since Election Day. He clicked his computer mouse for printouts from the laser-jet on his right. The room fell silent as everyone scanned the numbers. "I don't believe this," said Green Party representative A. Eric Prowten. He tapped on a calculator. "We're 252 ballots short."

The printouts showed the recount had tallied 38,072 early votes. On Tuesday, the count had been 38,324.

Shock and Disbelief

Shock and disbelief creased the faces in the room. This is humiliating, District Judge Baca thought. We're going to have to tell the press that we can't even keep track of our own ballots. She and the others figured the ballots probably had been misplaced, but they couldn't dismiss the possibility that someone had tried to manipulate the vote. District Judge Baca ordered a search of poll workers and 24-hour police security at the warehouse.

The group of observers, lawyers and officials in Mr. Lucero's office briefly discussed telling the journalists nothing for now. "No," Judge Baca said, "we have to tell the press, and we have to tell them right away." Sometime after 2 a.m., she faced the reporters, with Mr. Lucero standing nearby. One journalist asked if the missing ballots could compromise the election. "I think there has been a compromise already," the judge said.

The next morning, four days after the election, Judge Baca reconvened the recount assemblage at the warehouse. The building had been searched, but the missing ballots hadn't turned up.

While the group considered its next move, Nel Finberg, a Global Election technician, flipped open a door on one of the podiums that had been used at polling places to hold the Accu-Vote machines. Inside, he found a ballot. Now, only 251 were unaccounted for.

There was no simple way to track the missing ballots because no one kept a precise inventory of the ballot boxes. So Judge Baca ordered a hand inventory of the ballots in the warehouse. The group had just begun that laborious task when Lou Melvin suddenly appeared with a scuffed, knee-high ballot box at her feet. "I think I have found your ballots," she said.

Poll Worker and Partisan

Ms. Melvin, who is 70 years old and wears glasses with purple frames, is the secretary of the New Mexico GOP and a Republican elector. She would cast her electoral vote for Mr. Bush if he won the state. She also was a veteran polling-place worker.

Election experts say it's unusual but not unheard of for party officials like Ms. Melvin to be deeply involved in the voting process. "If you have a party official involved in the tabulation process itself, that is suspect as heck," says Kim Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc., a Washington, D.C., consulting firm. Ms. Melvin says she has never been questioned about a conflict of interest. "When you're counting these ballots, there are no thoughts of partisan politics," she says.

Ms. Melvin told those gathered in the warehouse she had spoken that morning with a friend, a Democrat, who had supervised an early-voting station. He had heard about the missing ballots on the news and remembered having a box containing about 250 ballots. Sure enough, Ms. Melvin said, she found the stray container sitting off to the side in the warehouse, its outer label turned to the wall. She told the others she had found it locked.

Someone produced bolt-cutters and snipped off the locks. "Don't touch those," said Mr. Rogers, the Republican lawyer. He thought that any fingerprints on the locks might be important if the ballot box wound up in court.

Out came a one-inch stack of ballots -- 257 of them. With the one Mr. Finberg had unearthed, the group now had six more ballots than it was looking for. Close enough, they decided.

It still wasn't over, though. There remained 379 early ballots. These were from the batch of 1,800 that the Accu-Vote scanners had failed to read, and which hadn't been hand-counted on Election Night because tired poll workers were mistakenly sent home.

The Democratic lawyers at the warehouse argued that under state law, early ballots that scanners fail to read shouldn't be counted at all. Republicans angrily insisted the votes had to be counted.

When scanners won't accept ballots, voters in Bernalillo normally are asked to redo them. But this year, some frustrated voters who had waited in long lines had given up. Rather than cancel their ballots, Ms. Melvin, the GOP activist, and other poll supervisors placed them in locked compartments and promised voters the ballots would be hand-counted.

Now, Ms. Melvin argued that state law did allow for a hand count of those ballots. She had promised voters. "I gave them my word," she said.

Was There a Conflict?

Ms. Woodward knew her fellow Democrats wouldn't be pleased if she sided with Ms. Melvin. But she said the Republican had done the right thing. "I think we should count them," the county clerk concluded.

Diane Denish, chairwoman of the state Democratic party, says Ms. Melvin's argument "looks suspicious. Lou Melvin ended up playing an integral role in Bernalillo County, and she's [a GOP] elector. I think that's a conflict."

The Democrats had reason to be nervous. After the 38,000 early votes had been tallied, including the stray piles of 258 and 379 ballots, Mr. Bush had passed Mr. Gore in New Mexico by just four votes: 285,644 to 285,640.

An Epilogue, With a Twist

The lead wouldn't hold. The following Monday, Dona Ana County, about 200 miles south of Albuquerque, disclosed that it had shorted Mr. Gore by 500 votes. Someone had mistaken the figure "620" for "120" in a voting tally. On Dec. 5, the state canvassing board certified Mr. Gore as the winner in New Mexico.

Ms. Woodward couldn't run for re-election this year because New Mexico limits countywide officials to two terms. As for Mr. Lucero, his cheerful manner disappears when asked how he feels about the election. "This has been the worst thing that ever happened to me," he says. "But we made it right. I can look at friends and neighbors and say, 'Your vote counted.' "

Mr. Lucero has heard that Ms. Woodward's successor plans to replace him, and he's looking for a new job.

Write to Bryan Gruley at bryan.gruley@wsj.com and Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com

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