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After being the first municipality to hold an election under Title 15, the state’s new election laws, Rehoboth Beach officials have come to one conclusion: The law is still a work in progress.
In a meeting on Thursday, Sept. 27, city officials such as supervisor of elections Wayne Steele, Mayor Sam Cooper, Commissioner Ron Paterson and Steve Simmons, campaign manager for candidate Stan Mills, discussed several issues relating to the law, particularly how to fix the absentee ballot procedure.
This year 356 people voted by absentee ballot, a record number that was largely the result of nonresident property owners having the right to vote this year. Many at the meeting said the process of counting absentee ballots needs to be further refined.
“As I understand it, that counting was completed prior to the closing of the polls,” Paterson said. “That meant anyone in the room then could leave the room and announce to whoever, what the results of the absentee voting was, which as I understand it, in this case, was not necessarily the results of the election.”
Steele said this is exactly what happened during this year’s election, when people who had participated in absentee ballot counting had left the room and informed the camps of candidates Pat Coluzzi and Patrick Gossett of the results. However, this did not accurately reflect the end results of the election, as Mills ended up winning by 132 votes.
In order to prevent this from happening, Steele suggested possibly having the board of elections select an apolitical group of absentee ballot officials. Steele also said another idea that had been suggested to him included numbering the candidates so their identities would be unknown.
However, Simmons disagreed with this idea because doing so would be manipulating the ballots.
“From a legal standpoint I think the names have to be read, it’s a ballot,” Simmons said. “If it’s a public hearing and these are official ballots, you can’t manipulate those ballots by putting A, B, and C on them.”
Cooper also said assigning numbers to candidates would be impractical because it would be difficult for those counting the ballots to not slip up and announce a candidate’s name.
Paterson broached the idea of starting the counting process closer to the closing of the polls. In this year’s election, absentee ballot counting started at 4:30 p.m. while the polls closed at 6 p.m.
Other concerns raised by the panel, included how to handle challenges to absentee ballots, changes to the affidavit required for citizens to vote absentee, clarification of the board of election’s role in challenges and candidate tents getting closer to the convention center and impeding traffic.
Simmons said some challengers were inappropriate in interacting with people coming into the polls.
“We did have challengers who were overzealous in conversations with people coming in to vote. Challengers are supposed to be really deaf and mute, they are not supposed to have any interaction, they are not supposed to wave, they are not supposed to have badges or use cell phones, which are prohibited in the polling area,” he said.
Cooper said this could be clarified by handing out a memo to challengers explaining the rules.
The panel also wanted to clarify the affidavit to ensure that those who vote absentee will remain absentee and not show up and also vote at the polls.
One thing the panel could agree on was that the state’s new law had some flaws to it and that Rehoboth would not be the first municipality to experience problems with the process.
“A lot of people are going to go through the same thing. I believe there is going to be some effort to make some changes to this law,” Cooper said. “We discussed it; we didn’t come to any conclusions. We wait to see what happens in the bigger sense and be ready to put our two cents into it.”
Contact Ryan Mavity at ryanm@capegazette.com
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