Critics Take Runoff Concerns To Elections Board
Tuesday, Oct 30, 2007 - 07:29 PM Updated: 09:16 PM
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RALEIGH, N.C. -- Wake County's Board of Elections spent the day evaluating Cary's pilot program for instant runoff elections.
The new system is designed to eliminate runoffs after the fact by having voters rank the candidates from top to bottom while they are casting their ballots.
As far as the Board of Elections' director is concerned, Cary's elections: no real controversies and every race had a winner.
Critics say it's not that simple.
"What IRV does is violate one of the basic principals of election integrity, which is simplicity," said Perry Woods, a political consultant in Cary.
He says a small glitch threw everything into turmoil.
Basically, someone counted the same group of votes twice; the error was caught, and corrected after an audit.
Woods says his problem is with how they conducted that audit.
"In this case, they ended up recounting all the ballots again and calling it an audit," said Woods. "I felt like if they were doing that, the public should have been involved, so no doubt is there."
The Board of Elections says they would rather not have to do it that way, but didn't have much choice because this was the first time this type of ballot has been used, and there's no software available to audit the ballots otherwise.
"We knew from the outset that the board would have to sort out those first choice votes and then hand tally the second choice," said Cherie Poucher, Wake County's Board Of Elections director. "If the legislature decides the state is going to do this, then I'm sure the software would be upgraded to do that."
Poucher says nobody ever handled the ballots without someone else present, and they worked hard to make sure the audit was fair and accurate.
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