December 7, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

On Wednesday morning, Dec. 6, six Greene County election officials gathered at the election board office to recount the ballots cast for the 8.4 mill Yellow Springs property tax levy, Issue 21, which came to an official tie two weeks ago after all the provisional ballots were counted. Having at first discovered what they thought to be an error, officials decided to recount by hand the ballots for all four precincts. But according to Lynn McCoy, the board’s deputy director, the error turned out to be on oversight, and the results of the election remained the same as the week before: the levy passed by one vote, 1,039 for the levy and 1,038 against it.

If an election results in a margin of less than one half of one percent, as did the vote for the village tax levy, the board of elections is required by the state to do an automatic recount of three percent of the ballots cast. In this case, the board set out to recount one entire precinct, which is more than three percent of the vote, beginning at random with precinct 442.

Working in pairs, Republican board members Marilyn Reid and Brenda Lewis worked with their Democratic counterparts Anne Gerard and Don Hollister, chairman of the board of elections, to recount both the paper ballots from provisional and absentee voters and the long scrolls of tape locked in plastic boxes that recorded the electronic votes cast at polling locations on election day. McCoy and Tracy Smith, director of the board of elections, also joined in the recount, as two technicians from Diebold Elections Systems looked on, ready to answer questions about the mechanics of the new electronic voting machines.

After recounting the absentee and provisional ballots from precinct 442, officials believed they had detected an extra vote cast in favor of the levy and determined to hand count the ballots from all four precincts. They realized part way through the complete recount, however, that the “extra” vote was in fact a ballot that had been mistakenly placed in the wrong precinct. After completing the recount, the officials determined that the vote was exactly the same as they had originally reported, two weeks after the general election.

One thing that became clear during the recount was the number of voters who chose not to cast a vote for Issue 21. The number of “blank” votes for the levy out of a total of 2,077 voters was 79, including 46 from polling locations, 26 from absentee ballots and 7 from provisional ballots.

On Election Day, Nov. 7, Issue 21 came to a statistical tie, with 999 votes cast in favor of the levy and 997 votes against it. When all the provisional and absentee ballots were included in the following week’s count, the total came to the official count cited at the beginning of the article.

The 8.4 mill levy is a five year property tax levy that is expected to generate $743,000 per year for the Village and is meant to address a deficit in the general fund.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com