By JOAN MCCOY
Leader staff writer
If it could have gone wrong with the election in White County, it did.
The machine that scanned the absentee ballots didn’t work. Some candidates were missing from the Union Township ballots and the poll workers couldn’t shut down the electronic voting machines because they weren’t set for daylight savings time.
Members of the White County Election Commission finally completed their counting at 1 a.m. Wednesday only to learn later that day that their tallies were wrong because they had used the wrong method to count the early votes. So Wednesday night they counted all the ballots again. The winners didn’t change, but the numbers did.
Now, Cathy Foster, who lost her District 1 race for the quorum court in the Democratic primary to incumbent Horace Taylor 146 to 145, has asked for a recount.
Dianne Thomas, who has been on the election commission for three years, said Friday that she has not been through an election with so many problems. But some were caused by mistakes that they have all learned from, and she expects the November election to run smoothly.
In the Democratic primary for the Arkansas House of Representatives, Kieth Williams won over Johnny Wheetley in District 49, 930 to 747. But there will be a runoff in District 58 between Jody Dickinson and L.J. Bryant. In that race, Dickinson received 253 votes to Bryant’s 199 while Jerry Carlew received 105 and Jamie Darling received 98.
There also will be a runoff for Searcy District Court judge between Mark Pate and Phyllis Worley, who received 2,875 and 1,341 respectively. Also in that four-way race were Greg Niblock, 1,297 votes and Robert Hudgins, 833 votes.
The runoff for the House of Representatives will be June 10, but the runoff in the judicial race will be held during the November general election.
Voters in White and Prairie counties got to choose the new circuit court judge. White County preferred Mark Derrick by a narrow margin, while Prairie County wanted Tom Hughes. But when votes from both counties were added together, Hughes came out the winner by 528 votes. In White County the vote was 3,112 to 3,095 in Derrick’s favor. But in Prairie County, the vote was 1,020 to 475 in Hughes’ favor.
In the Democratic primary for White County judge, Dennis Gillam won over Barth Grayson 2,221 to 1,880.
In the Republican primary race for District 2 of the quorum court, incumbent Larry Fisher lost to Bobby Burns, 81 to 67.
Thomas said a candidate brought to the election commission’s attention the problem with the counting of early voting ballots.
Something was noticeably wrong because the count showed that too many choices on the ballots were left unmarked.
A call to the secretary of state uncovered the problem, she said. With the electronic voting machines, the votes may be counted in two different ways. The ballots used by early voters are supposed to be counted after regular ballots and the tallying is supposed to be done from the computer chips in the PEBs called flashcards.
The commission counted the ballots first using information stored directly in the PEBs and as a result of those mistakes; some of the counts were twice as high as they should have been.
Thomas said the commission has learned that a ballot for early voting contains more data than a PEB can accurately process. Only the flashcard accurately processes early voting ballots.
White County has about 46,000 registered voters but Thomas said only about 12 percent voted in the primary.
Voter apathy is partly to blame, she said, adding that a low turnout was expected because the presidential primary was in February this year.
“I’ve had several people tell me they forgot,” she said. “They voted in February, but they forgot about this primary.”
