THE ELECTION Officials to probe mishaps

A commissioner would like the investigation to be conducted in secret.
By HAROLD GWIN
VINDICATOR SHARON BUREAU
MERCER, Pa. -- Mercer County commissioners will appoint an independent, bipartisan panel to investigate what went wrong in last week's election.
Brian Beader, commission chairman, proposed the creation of the panel Tuesday, saying he wants it to look into all aspects of the election.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, said it isn't launching an investigation of its own but will await a report from Mercer County's own probe.
Central to the investigation will be what happened to cause touch-screen voting machines in a dozen southern Shenango Valley voting precincts to malfunction and how the problem can be avoided in the future. Some of the machines failed to work all day.
Jim Bennington, county director of elections, has acknowledged that he misprogrammed the computers. The result was that the machines shut down, said Commissioner Olivia Lazor.
Bennington is a Republican. Most of the machine problems were in Democratic-controlled precincts, prompting Robert Lark, Democratic party chairman, to demand that Bennington be fired.
Beader said the independent panel could consist of five or seven members, with the Democratic and Republican parties each getting one representative.
Both parties would also get an attorney to serve on the panel, and Beader said the county is looking for a representative from the Mercer County League of Women Voters and perhaps someone from the local colleges to serve as well.
Vote discrepancy
Another key issue of the probe will be the discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the number of votes recorded in the presidential race and other races.
Unofficial returns reported by the election office showed that some 4,000 people either decided not to vote for president or their votes weren't counted by the touch-screen machines.
Lazor had a plausible explanation of how the latter might have occurred.
This was the first time many voters used the touch-screen system, she said, noting that people who vote only in presidential years used the old mechanical lever machines in 2000.
Unfamiliarity with the touch-screen system could have resulted in lost votes, she said.
A person voting a straight party ticket on the new system makes that decision on the first page to appear on the screen.
However, they must still scroll through the remaining ballot pages to get to the end where they have to actually record that vote.
Some straight ticket voters, as they screened through the ballot, also touched the names of their candidates as they went page by page, a move that negated their straight-party vote and resulted in no vote being cast, Lazor said.
If they didn't carefully examine the review page at the end of the ballot, they wouldn't have noticed the machine showed no votes were made, Lazor said, adding that no one will ever know how many times that scenario might have happened.
Timetable
Beader said he wants the independent panel to be in place next week, and he wants it to be able to conduct its probe behind closed doors and then make a report to the board of elections (the three county commissioners) who will then release the findings to the public.
The official vote count began Friday and is expected to take at least two weeks, Lazor said, adding that each of the 250 touch-screen voting machines will be examined.
Bennington had estimated there were about 1,000 absentee, paper and provisional ballots that weren't counted on election night. They will also be part of the official count.
Paper ballots are different from provisional ballots. The latter are given to voters when there is some dispute about whether they are registered or where they should be voting. Provisional ballots were few, Lazor said.