By Jeff Goldblatt

Lake County elections officials, under fire for holding up the Democratic primary tallies in Indiana for hours Tuesday night, say several factors contributed to the delays and vowed to reevaluate their methods to avoid a repeat of the problems in November.

The county — Indiana’s second most populous, with about 500,000 people — was the last of the state’s 92 counties to release its vote total. The slow reporting precluded the majority of national media outlets from projecting the winner of the state’s Democratic primary until after midnight.

“We had an election that caused an incredible desire for timely information. And we didn’t meet that. We weren’t able to meet it,” admitted Lake County Election Board Attorney David Saks.

It wasn’t until after 5 a.m. local time that Lake County tallied 100 percent of its vote, with Barack Obama getting 56 percent and Hillary Clinton getting 43 percent. Clinton won the state by 2 points.

Early on, election officials said they were challenged by a record number of absentee votes — more than 11,000. That’s more than three times what the county sees during a typical primary.

They said the vote tabulation was then complicated by a number of other problems: high voter turnout and electronic voting machines used for the first time in a countywide election, 40 of which didn’t properly tally vote totals. Election supervisors were forced to conduct a hand count of these machines.

Election supervisors said they got a good start on counting the thousands of paper ballots before polls closed, but they didn’t dedicate enough time early in the night to counting the machine votes cast on Election Day.

“We maybe should have stopped on the absentees a little bit earlier,” said Michelle Fajman, Lake County election administrator.

Election officials here say nothing illegal happened to slow the pace of the vote count. They say this was a case of wanting to take the time to get things right.

But Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita said the Lake County election board needs to be more accountable.

“This is a board made up of politicians and political wannabes,” he said. “And I don’t put politics past delaying the vote or anything like that.”

Suspicion of impropriety still lingers, especially in the Democratic African American stronghold of Gary, where turnout was heavy. Clinton was holding on to a healthy lead in Indiana early in the night, but when returns from Gary came in, Obama began to narrow the gap.

“It’s had a history going back many decades of a certain amount of political hanky-panky,” FOX News contributor Michael Barone said.

In 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Lake County one of the most corrupt counties in the nation.

In 2004, the state Supreme Court tossed out a mayoral election in East Chicago because of campaign misconduct that resulted in dozens of voter-fraud convictions. The county eventually purged the voter rolls countywide to try and clean up the system.

In 2005, former congresswoman Katie Hall resigned as the Gary city clerk after pleading guilty to federal mail-fraud charges. That case resulted from accusations that she made office workers raise money for her re-election campaigns in order to keep their jobs.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Indiana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.