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Spoiled ballots
prompt pledge for
more election
education

The project manager for the company that supplied the voting machines to the state says it will try to improve poll worker education and voter education for the next elections.

"We had a fair amount of spoiled ballots," said Todd Mullen, Election Systems and Software project manager, "which simply means the voter didn't understand the open primary. The good news was, they spoiled their ballot. When they voted improperly, the machine stopped them and said, 'Hey, are you sure you want to vote this way?'"

After the company's bad experience in the primary election two years ago, Mullen said it modified its machines so that this time it was easier to feed the ballots into the machine.

Interesting numbers: A preliminary comparison of this year's mayoral race with the one that took place four years ago shows:

Harris managed to obtain the magical "50 percent plus one vote" number, which allowed him to avoid a runoff. However, his 94,607 votes (50.7 percent of votes cast) this year is less than the 94,846 votes he got in the 1996 primary, when he missed eliminating Arnold Morgado by 1,415 votes (49.3 percent) and was forced into a runoff.
Hannemann got 65,652 votes, more than the 56,241 votes Morgado received in the 1996 primary. Percentage-wise, Hannemann got 35 percent of the vote, while Morgado got only 29 percent.
Fasi, again the third-place finisher this year, got 23,293 votes, or 12.6 percent of the votes cast. In 1996 he got 38,744, which was 20 percent.

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