Greens seek apology over voting irregularities; Candidates to address county election board

For Immediate Release

Greens seek apology over voting irregularities
Candidates to address county election board

Two 2007 write-in candidates for municipal offices in South Bend - Tom Brown and Karl Hardy who ran for Mayor and Common Council At-large, respectively - plan to request a formal apology from the St. Joseph County Election Board for their part in problems with both the counting of legal votes and the treatment of write-in voters.

A third Green write-in candidate, David Vollrath, cannot attend the Tuesday morning meeting but will prepare a statement to the board as well. Vollrath ran for a Mishawaka Common Council At-large seat.

The candidates point to election returns that show more than 60% of machine-recorded write-in votes cast in their races not being attributed to any candidate. Brown, Hardy, and Vollrath were the only registered write-in candidates running in the municipal elections and none are contesting the outcome of the respective races.

“This is about our fundamental right to run for public office and have our votes counted,” said Brown. “In failing to count all legal votes, our election board is out of compliace with Indiana law.”

Brown added that he and Hardy also planned to ask the board to create a plan to count legal write-in votes in the upcoming 2008 election, noting the likelihood of write-in candidacies for both declared independent Ralph Nader and the eventual Green Party nominee as well as other potential third party or independent candidacies at all levels of elected office.

In addition to the failure to count votes, voters and poll watchers documented other serious problems. Problems included some voters being asked by poll workers if they planned to cast a write-in vote, a direct violation of citizens' right to cast a private ballot; poll workers being observed tallying write-in votes in public view before the close of polls; voters being erroneously instructed by poll workers to feed their ballots with write-in votes into the scanners, thus nullifying their write-in votes. Two poll workers admitted to the South Bend Tribune that they'd been instructed to ask voters with write-in choices to tally their own votes.

“What we are asking for is simple accountability for these problems that have occurred,” said Hardy. “The election board members must uphold the sacred trust we place in them to maintain the integrity of our democratic process.”

The St. Joseph County Election Board will meet Tuesday March 11 at 10am in the 4th floor County Council Conference Chambers in the County-City building located in South Bend.