CLAYTON • Ballot shortages, delayed vote tabulations and faulty polling equipment resulted in a botched municipal election Tuesday that has everyone from Gov. Jay Nixon to the voting public denouncing the agency responsible for the fiasco: the St. Louis County Board of Elections.
The polls had yet to close before Nixon, Secretary of State Jason Kander, County Executive Steve Stenger and countless voters delivered a verdict on the performance of an agency that managed to deliver incorrect ballots or no ballots at all to more than 60 precincts spread across the county.
Stenger said Tuesday during the voting problems, “That board really needs to get its act together.”
He said the situation “is completely unacceptable because it affects every resident in St. Louis County.”
Nixon, who appoints the members of the board, was notably aggressive, promising that Democrat Eric Fey and Republican Gary Fuhr, the officials heading the election agency, be “held accountable for this unacceptable failure.”
The governor’s spokesman deferred questions on Wednesday about the fate of Fey and Fuhr to the findings of an inquiry by the Secretary of State’s Election Integrity Unit.
Kander, who commissioned the investigation, said the process of debriefing election officials began Wednesday.
Reeling from events that turned him into a target of abuse on social media and in polling places countywide, Fey acknowledged that job security could not be a priority.
“It’s kind of out of my hands,” said Fey, the lead director of an agency with a staff of 90 full- and part-time employees. “My focus has to be on correcting the issues here.”
Chief among those issues is how some precincts on Tuesday wound up with too many ballots, not enough ballots or ballots listing candidates and issues from other jurisdictions.
Fey said it appeared that the disconnect was rooted in a database glitch coupled with a breakdown of systemic checks and double checks before the start of voting at 6 a.m. Tuesday.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of what went wrong,” Fey pledged. “And we’re going to address the problems and put new controls in place.”
An inexcusable debacle
In an interview, Kander credited Fuhr and Fey for “taking full responsibility” for a situation that spiraled out of control. The secretary of state said he expected to disclose next week the results of the Integrity Unit investigation.
“We will try to determine what went wrong,” said Kander, calling the chaos at as many as 50 county polling places “inexcusable.”
The concern in Clayton in the aftermath of an Election Day that included orders issued by two separate state courts focused in part on how the irregularities might affect county finances.
“It could lead to some contested races by people who feel they were disenfranchised,” said County Councilman Mark Harder, a Republican, who successfully pressed Tuesday night for the council to hold a public hearing — or Committee of the Whole — on the marred election.
The county court system will absorb the cost of challenges to Tuesday’s results.
Meanwhile, in Jefferson City, State Rep. Courtney Allen Curtis, D-Ferguson, responded to the “debacle” by summoning Fuhr and Fey to a hearing Thursday morning.
Curtis later postponed the proceedings to provide the officials with additional time to “gather more information about what went wrong.”
Curtis said he fully intended to pursue the matter at a later date.
What happened Tuesday, he said, “doesn’t restore faith in the electoral system, that’s for sure.”
‘Bad planning’
The overarching question in both Clayton and Jefferson City on Wednesday centered on how to best rectify a pattern of Election Day irregularities in St. Louis County.
The chair of the Senate Financial, Governmental and Elections Committee, Sen. Jay Wasson, R-Nixa, acknowledged that “something has to be changed.” But Wasson wasn’t sure a remedy lay with state lawmakers.
“I can’t legislate bad planning,” the senator noted.
Nor is it clear what powers, if any, Nixon might have to reverse what many characterize as a systemic electoral breakdown.
In Missouri, the responsibility of appointing the six election board commissioners — three from each party — falls to the governor. The commissioners then select two directors, one from each party, to essentially run the electoral apparatus.
Each commissioner serves for four years. But, as former Elections Director Rita Days learned, the length of tenure is not set in stone.
The commissioners dismissed Days, a political ally of former County Executive Charlie Dooley, in mid-January 2015 from the directorship she had held since 2011.
Her replacement was Fey, a legislative aide to Democratic Councilman Pat Dolan — a staunch supporter of Stenger, the former council member who took over for Dooley on Jan. 1, 2015, after ousting the incumbent in a bitter primary.
State statutes give the governor authority to hire or appoint members of election boards and other commissions. But the law allows the removal of a sitting commissioner or board member only for “misconduct in office.”
Kander, for his part, contends the electoral dysfunction should be addressed at the local level.
“The folks in St. Louis County are the only ones who can take care of it,” he said.
David Kimball, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor of political science with an expertise in elections, said the process could start with a thorough review of the election headquarters staff.
Kimball said he believed Fey and Fuhr had been unfairly castigated by Nixon and other critics.
“You have to hold an election with the staff you’ve been handed,” he said. “Firing the two of them won’t solve the problem. You have to clean house with what you have.”
Searching for solutions, state Sen. Jill Schupp, D-Creve Coeur, wondered on Wednesday why the task of voting in the county had regressed given the availability of “technology that helps get things right.
“You’d think this would get easier, not harder,” said Schupp, a member of the Senate Financial, Governmental and Elections Committee.
The county is in fact poised to bring up-to-date technology to the electoral process. In a request for proposals posted last month, the county began soliciting bids from vendors interested in supplying an “election management system” that will introduce “poll books” (a hand-held computer such as an iPad) to county precincts.
Given the track record in recent elections, Harder is wary of that solution.
The introduction of poll books, he notes, will require intensive training of officials both in the field and at election headquarters.
“And we can’t have that if we can’t even get the paper ballots right,” Harder said.
Steve Giegerich • 314-725-6758
@stevegiegerich on Twitter
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