Ballots mixed in few state elections

Some voters hit ID snags at polls

Phillips County voters said they cast the wrong ballots in the Marvell mayoral election Tuesday because ballots for people inside and outside the city limits were mixed up.

In the highly contested race for Marvell mayor, rural voters received city ballots and city voters got county ballots. The county ballots did not include candidates for mayor.

Amanda Moody, who lives in the city, said she went to vote about 8 a.m. and realized after voting that she hadn’t been able to vote for mayor. There are three candidates in this year’s election.

“I just hope something gets rectified,” Moody said.

One of the candidates, Lee Guest, said he heard about the problem early when he went by the polls before going to work at the local post office.

“Even if I win, I still want it contested because it’s not right,” Guest said. “We have people who voted who shouldn’t have been able to vote, and people who should have voted who

weren’t able to.”

Reached by phone Tuesday night, the elections commissioner said he didn’t have time to comment and did not return subsequent phone calls.

In Pulaski County, voting problems were not widespread, but may have resulted in a few votes being incorrectly counted.

The Pulaski County Election Commission office received a report about 8:20 a.m. that a few people voting at Sherman Park in North Little Rock received ballots for Ward 1 instead of Ward 2, said Bryan Poe, elections director. The voting site is for people in either ward.

Linda Robinson, the Ward 2 incumbent, said a couple told her they cast their votes but she wasn’t on the ballot, so she called the commission. The race for Ward 1, represented by Debi Ross, was not contested.

“When you’re running for office, every vote counts,” Robinson said. “That’s two votes I lost.”

Harlan Hunter, Robinson’s opponent, said he didn’t think people realized there was something wrong until after they had voted. He started getting calls about it about 8:30 a.m.

“I’m just trying to wait to hear how can they correct that? I know that there’s some votes, I lost some votes this morning,” Hunter said.

Once alerted to the problem, Election Commission staff members called the poll judge and asked her to talk to poll workers and sent an employee to check on the situation about 20 minutes later, but the votes had already been cast.

“The ones that are incorrectly cast, unfortunately there’s nothing we can do,” said Bryan Poe, the elections director. He wasn’t sure how many votes may have been wrong but said it was “fairly small.”

The votes will still be counted for all the offices on the ballot, he said, they just won’t have voted for any City Council members in their ward.

Little Rock saw a similar problem when a few Ward 2 voters at the Adult Education Center received Ward 1 ballots. Poe said he called the location to remind workers of the correct procedure and said the problem was not widespread.

The Ward 2 race had four candidates, and the Ward 1 election had nine.

At least a dozen Philander Smith College students had trouble voting. Some weren’t able to cast their ballots, said Tamara Bates, an admissions counselor at the private historically black college in Little Rock.

Bates drove back and forth from campus to the Dunbar Recreation Center throughout the day, taking about 50 students to the Precinct 118 voting site. Poll workers had refused to give some students traditional ballots because they had only Philander Smith student identification cards and not any government-issued identification, she said.

Arkansas law allows student identifications to be used at the polls, as long as they are from public institutions.

Some of the students filed provisional ballots instead but said they didn’t feel welcome at the polling site.

“This whole experience makes me not want to vote again,” said Jordan Caldwell, an 18-year-old Philander Smith student. “They were rude, and they didn’t seem like they wanted to help me fill out the information for the provisional ballot.”

Poe said the issue with the college students stemmed from a flawed volunteer voter drive before the elections and had nothing to do with the student IDs.

“There were several voter registration drives that were done poorly,” Poe said. “There were stacks of papers where someone else [other than the voter] signed the applications.”