A bipartisan election night disaster
Last night, the ballot-counting process for Bloomington city elections was stopped and will continue later today. Therefore, we do not have final results for the city council races and will not have results until later today.
From the Herald-Times:
Those paper ballots were digitally scanned. The law is different for hand-counting, and apparently only one person on the election board was aware of it.
"I found out months ago," Smith-Ille said Tuesday night.
Asked why she didn’t inform her fellow election board members, she said, "They don't listen to me. ... I speak up all the time. It goes in one ear, out the other. I didn't want to be responsible for a Class D felony." So she spoke up, but not until two days before the election.
Wow.
Just... wow.
First, the clerk should have known about the law. There's no excuse for her not knowing and this is enough reason to throw her out of office in 2014.
However, for Judy Smith-Ille not to tell the clerk about these process-breaking rules is irresponsible and reeks of sabotage. Unacceptable. It's time for her to be removed from the election board.