Alexandria election officials will be going back to the future in the next few weeks, pouring over thousands of paper ballots by hand as part of a recount effort in the hotly contested race for attorney general. Although other jurisdictions with paper ballots will be reprogramming their scanners for the recount, election officials say the Hart InterCivic machines currently in use in Alexandria and Charlottesville have some key limitations that prevent them from being reprogrammed. “It’s not like that would happen in a split second by feeding them through the machine,” said Deputy Registrar Anna Lieder. “So we are prepared to do a hand count if that’s what’s required.” Election officials say the Hart InterCivic machines have two problems that would lead to a hand recount of all paper ballots. One is that the scanners must be able to conduct a recount for the race in question without also doing a recount for all the other races on the ballot, one of the limitations of the brand purchased by city officials. Another problem is that the scanners must be able to separate ballots where the voter has written in a name and under vote ballots, where no vote was registered for the attorney general race. Election officials say the stack of undervote ballots are likely to include a number of ballots where a voter may have written the name of a candidate or marked it in a way that was not picked up by the electronic scanner. “All these scanning devices have benefits and drawbacks,” said Lieder. “These are much more precise and easier to mark in the initial voting process.”
After the 2005 recount of the race for attorney general between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds, the Virginia General Assembly made some changes that will influence how recounts work in the future. One key difference is how paper ballots are counted. Although Deeds wanted all of the paper ballots to be fed throughout the scanners again, a judge determined that was not called for under the existing code. So paper ballots were only fed through scanners in a few precincts that were challenged. Deeds himself introduced legislation to change that, so now all the paper ballots are required to be sent through the scanners once again.
“I think it’s true that most people, when they envision a recount, they think of Florida and holding up ballots looking for hanging chads or counting each individual ballots one by one,” says Alexandria registrar Tom Parkins. “That was old technology.”
During a recount, though, the scanners must be programmed differently. On Election Day, the scanners only separated overvotes. That meant that if a voter had selected more than one candidate in a race, the scanner would spit it back out while the voter was still at the precinct. So election officials could work with the voter to cast a ballot that would be logged by the scanner. Undervotes, on the other hand, were not spit back out by the scanners on Election Day. That means that many voters may have thought they cast a ballot for attorney general and walked out of the voting precinct without knowing their vote did not count.
Full Article: Alexandria to Hand Count All Paper Ballots in Recount For Attorney General.