Democratic primary day in the District had troubles at the beginning and end Tuesday — keeping the mayor’s race between Mayor Adrian Fenty and top challenger Vince Gray in doubt well into the early hours on Wednesday.
There were malfunctions at the start with some of the newly purchased electronic voting machines and two precincts reportedly opening about 30 minutes late.
Gray pushed for to have the polls stay open two hours past their scheduled 8 p.m. closing time, but that request was refused by D.C. Superior Court Judge Joan Zeldon Tuesday evening.
Counting was also delayed by same-day registration that required special ballots to be cast. Those ballots took longer to fill out and caused some precincts to close late.
As of 11 p.m. — three hours after the scheduled close of the polls — the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics had announced the results of a mere 6,999 votes cast in the mayor’s race. That’s about 2 percent of the registered voters in the city.
The elections board’s Website had a link that summed up the board’s muddled efforts to determine a winner in the hotly contested race: “Election results: Will be available after results are available.”
Alysoun McLaughlin, the election board’s spokeswoman, said the count was held up because it was the first time procedures had been implemented using new voting equipment.
Throughout the day, it appeared voter turnout was lower than expected. The board of elections had prepared for about 200,000 voters, but reports from precincts across the city showed that voting was likely to be much closer to the 100,000 average of the past two mayoral primaries.
Gray, the D.C. Council chairman, was one of the voters affected by problems with an electronic voting machine in his precinct in Ward 7. The mayoral candidate said he couldn’t vote on the touch screen machine and had to cast a paper ballot. Election board officials said ballots like those cast by Gray would be run through voting machines and be counted later in the day.
Board of elections head Rokey Suleman said 15 to 20 of the city’s 143 precincts were affected by broken down machines.
Gray said he was “very disappointed” by the problems at the polling stations. Fenty stayed secluded as votes were being counted, and his campaign issued no comment about the polling troubles.
Phyllis Johnson, the precinct captain at Payne Elementary in Ward 6, said the touch screen broke around 11 a.m., causing a 30-minute delay as paper ballots were collected to be scanned when a replacement machine arrived.
The busy Ward 4 polling station at Shepherd Elementary school opened 10 minutes late because the janitorial staff didn’t show up on time to open the doors, said precinct captain SaVanna Wanzer.
“This is typical of what happens when jurisdictions implement new equipment,” said board of elections head Rokey Suleman. “People can come back if they were turned away, it doesn’t affect the final count,” he said.
But that wasn’t enough for the Gray for Mayor campaign, which filed a motion with the board of elections to extend voting by two hours — until 10 p.m. — so voters who missed out earlier in the day could have a chance to cast a ballot.
In its motion to board of elections Chairman Togo West, the Gray campaign laid out a list of complaints ranging from broken machines to voters being turned away for no reason to voters being denied access to paper ballots when they requested them.
The board of elections turned the Gray campaign down, so it appealed to D.C. Superior Court and Gray’s lawyers found themselves arguing in front of a judge with about an hour to go before the polls closed at 8 p.m.
The Fenty campaign argued that changing the closing time would be a violation of the equal protections clause in the constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Zeldon seemed annoyed from the outset of the debate, at one point interrupting a Gray poll watcher-turned-witness to say, “this makes no sense.”
Zeldon knocked down the appeal with 10 minutes to go before her deadline and the polls closed as scheduled at 8 p.m.
Examiner intern Anna Waugh contributed to this report.
