For the February 22, 2011 Consolidated Primary Election, which in Champaign County includes just one contest (a Democratic Primary for Alderman in Urbana’s Ward 2), in-person and by-mail absentee voting has begun.

To vote in person, please come to our office, at 1776 E. Washington in Urbana.

To vote by mail, you can request ballots either by calling our office at 217-384-3720, or by submitting a request online.

More detailed instructions for voting absentee are here.  Please email or call if you have any questions, and if you live in Urbana’s Ward 2, please remember to vote.

I wanted to post a quick hello message on my first day as Champaign County Clerk.

As you know if you’re reading this, Mark Shelden set an incredibly high standard as he led this office for 13 1/2 years, and I am honored to succeed him and greatly appreciative of all his advice and assistance during the past few weeks of transition.

I’ll be posting here regularly, just as Mark did, although my focus won’t be as much on election law, as I don’t yet have Mark’s expertise.  My initial posts will be on our office’s policies and procedures, how the law  impacts them, and perhaps ways we can use technology to better achieve our objectives and serve our County residents more efficiently.

For today, though, I just wanted to say hello, introduce myself, and say “Thank you” to everyone for their support, but especially to Mark and the office staff – the best in Illinois.  Thank you.

I doubt that I’ll have a better job than being Champaign County Clerk.  This wonderful opportunity to work with a great staff in service to the community in securing one of the most fundamental of our rights has truly been a blessing.

I’m moving on to become the Chief of Staff for Congressman Tim Johnson-IL 15.  I’m moving on to something different, but I can’t say better.

I can’t imagine that the issues that I care about in elections will ever be too far from my mind.   I’ll be following them with interest in my new position.

Thanks to all of you who put your confidence in me to safeguard Champaign County elections.  I have every expectation that the high standards for integrity and efficiency that have been established will be continued and improved upon by successor, Gordy Hulten.

Last month, I posted the results of our retab and hand count, and noted that there was an unexplained glitch.  We didn’t drop the issue and now I’m prepared to give some details on what we found out.

First, I want to thank ES&S who came in to our office to do a thorough examination of the ballots in question and proceed to determine what went wrong.  They found the problem.

What stood out on the problem ballots was the rather bold and big initials by the election judge.  At the same time, those same initials were on hundreds of other ballots in the precinct without causing any problem.

ES&S used a “Graphic Dump” on the M100 to show exactly what was being read in each oval on the ballot. What that graphic dump showed was that for the ballots in question, when placed in the machine top first, the M100 read not the area within the oval, but rather the area to the left.  That area to the left corresponds to the place on the top of the ballot where the judge’s initials go within the area that contains the column timing bars.

Essentially what appears to have happened is that when the judge’s initials cross into the timing area within a very limited range and at a very limited angle (that is, very horizontal), that extra line is being read as one of the column timing bars.  No one at ES&S had seen this before, and it is odd enough that it is unlikely that its cropped up many times before.  At the same time, I’d be surprised if we were the first people to witness this.

Taking this information, we decided to have some fun and see if we could design some ballots that would misread but still count votes.   The problem on election day and in the retab did not result in votes being cast incorrectly, but rather in either an unreadable ballot or overvote.

You can see a ballot that we designed as well as the results tape.   We then put the line at the top in the timing area to replicate the error.  If you look at the results tape, you can see that while we filled in the oval for Ed Ott both times on race 4, the machine read those votes as votes for Blankenship because instead of picking up the filled in oval, it picked up instead the words in the candidate name in the column to the left.

As I said, this is a very unique set of circumstances.  Nevertheless, we’ll be changing instructions to judges about the initials crossing into the timing area to prevent it from happening again.