'It was a travesty': State report shows depth of Porter County Election Day confusion for police
Post-Tribune
March 15, 2019
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/news/ct-ptb-porter-election-sheriff-st-0317-story.html
Porter County Sheriff’s Department deputies who worked on Election Day in November faced confusion from the get-go, including poll workers who didn’t show up or hadn’t been properly trained, and locked polling places, according to a report from the Indiana Secretary of State’s office.
The woes faced by officers assigned election detail are spelled out in 38 pages of police reports, part of the documentation of the troubles of the election put together by the Voting System Technical Oversight Program, or VSTOP, and released Wednesday.
County commissioners asked Secretary of State Connie Lawson to investigate the election, and a letter by her accompanying the report noted toxic and dysfunctional relationships that resulted in late-opening polls, a lack of poll workers, 18,000 absentee ballots not being delivered to precincts to be counted, and preliminary election results that were more than two days late.
On Election Day, said Sheriff David Reynolds, four officers were assigned to an early shift and another four were assigned to a later shift. In past elections, eight officers fulfilled the duties each shift.
In all, 20 officers worked some aspect of election detail, including guarding ballots at the courthouse and the county administration building in the days after the election until counting of the absentee ballots was complete.
The clerk’s office paid for some of that time, he said, but not all of it.
“We had some on duty and paid out almost $5,000 in overtime,” he said, adding he never asked for reimbursement from the clerk’s office for the expense. “We were just trying to keep (the ballots) secure when we knew we had a serious issue.”
A deputy assigned to the early shift on Election Day charged with delivering blank ballots and other items to polling places in the Duneland area found multiple poll workers hadn’t shown up, the report said.
Poll workers at Faith Memorial Lutheran Church in Liberty Township couldn’t find the voting equipment and once the deputy helped locate it and set it up, the officer discovered “nobody here had been trained on how to use the ballot counting machine,” according to one of the reports.
A ballot counting machine technician on site provided a “crash course” in how to operate the machine, the report states, but the polling place still couldn’t open because they didn’t have a Republican inspector or judge.
“Both sides, Democrat and Republican, need to fall on the sword because poll workers weren’t there,” Reynolds said.
A total of 13 polling places opened late and emergency court orders kept 12 of them open a full 12 hours, though Reynolds said that didn’t help voters who showed up early to vote and couldn’t return later to take advantage of the extended hours.
Absentee ballots are usually distributed to the precincts to be counted, Reynolds said, but that never happened because the ballots had not been sorted. As the day wore on, according to the reports, officers spent hours waiting for the ballots to be sorted so they could deliver them.
By that night, Reynolds said, he was getting calls to his personal cellphone from poll workers who had it to say they were still waiting on absentee ballots hours after the polls closed.
He told them to pack up and bring their equipment back to the administration building, but had no way to communicate that message to all of the polling places where workers were still waiting.
“As the report reflects, it was a travesty,” he said.
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