Turmoil surrounds Washoe Voting

Wednesday, Nov. 11, 1998 | 11:47 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- John Byerly says he's never seen anything like the turmoil surrounding the re-counting of election ballots in the 10 years he has been overseeing the process in Washoe County.

But Byerly adds, "I can't tell you who is to blame." He's been a member of the Accuracy Certification Board for a decade.

Former Gov. Bob List, who headed the monitoring team for Rep. John Ensign, called it "Disneyland," referring to the confusion, delays and changes of direction.

Eight days after the election, there's no final vote tally in Washoe County. "There's been one stumbling block after another," said Laura Dancer, county voter registrar. The latest came at midnight when there was another computer crash.

And the more problems, the greater the chance Ensign and the Republican Party will seek to challenge the final results, which give Sen. Harry Reid a small lead.

After the returns were tallied the day after election in Washoe County, problems arose. Test runs on one of the computers that counted the ballots proved faulty. The county had to get permission from District Judge Janet Berry to reopen the ballots and start processing those ballots that were tallied on that computer.

Then it was discovered by nearly 6,000 ballots had been misprinted and misshaped by the Washoe County Printing Department. They had to be hand-counted, a process that took 30 hours instead of the estimated 15 hours. The county accepted volunteers, even some people off the street who were not registered to vote. But when they came in, they signed up to vote.

Dancer said these people were supervised, and their results were checked.

But it took 12 hours to make sure the computer program would spew out correct results. It had been estimated to take only 3-4 hours.

The program is set up to stop vote tampering. It would accept results from memory cards but not manual entered data. So county officials worked seven hours building a new data base. That crashed too.

County election officials then made a copy of the original data base and used that to key in results. But that can only be done with great difficulty. Sometimes the computer program would accept the results, and sometimes it would kick them out.

"It was a pain to break into the program," said Kathy Carter, a spokeswoman for the county. She said the original data base is kept locked in the county vault. "We're not corrupting anything."

There is only one computer that can be used to enter the data. That's another security measure to prevent vote tampering.

Workers took turns through the night typing in the results. Dancer worked for several hours but was constantly interrupted to give television interviews and to answer telephone queries.

A process that was supposed to take 6-9 hours was only one-third complete after 12 hours.

During the night, monitors from both the Ensign and Reid camp remain in a room outside the counting area, sleeping in chairs or benches. Because of a cutback by the county in janitorial staff, trash cans overflowed with coffee cups, wrappers and soft coke bottles.

In one of the rare shows of unity, the staffers from both sides cleaned up the room early today.

Dancer said she must turn out a certified result to the county commission that is broken down into certain categories. Hand-counted ballots are difficult to be broken down manually, she said.

Asked if it might be better to just hand-count all of the 90,000 ballots in Washoe County, Dancer said "That is not an option."