Horn, Jacobs critique committee for slow progress on ‘deep dive’ into 2022 election woes

Chairman fires back, says answers to Board questions were provided

By ROTA L. KNOTT Contributing Writer

With some members of the Board of Directors taking to task the Elections Committee for not moving more quickly to make recommendations for ensuring the August 2023 will not be bungled like last year’s vote count, Committee Chairman Tom Piatti fired back during the Board’s Feb. 18 monthly meeting.

He said the committee is working as fast as it can, and that committee critics need to keep in mind that all of the members are new.

He said they “had to dig in and do a lot of research” to learn about both how the 2022 Board election process was handled and the scanning equipment used to conduct and count the votes.

He said that answers to questions posed by the Board have been answered by the committee.

Following the resignation of the former Elections Committee members who were seated during the 2022 Board election, the Board appointed a new group of volunteers.

The new committee members were tasked with investigating and providing findings to the glitches in the voting scan system, tabulation of the votes from the last election, and making recommendations to prevent the same problems from happening in the future.

Piatti said the first task was to determine

Committee critique

From Page 7 why there was 940 vote error in the August 2022 election.

That vote error was actually determined by the previous election committee, he said, adding that it was due to double counting on the paper ballots due to bleed through on the light paper stock and because the ballots had to be folded in by placed in the return envelope.

At the behest of the Board, the committee then moved on to studying the systems and processes used to conduct the last election to determine where and understand why the breakdowns occurred.

Piatti said one of the first things the committee did was to meet with the OPA’s IT department to set up the scanner used to count the ballots and to go through that process.

He said the IT staff pointed out several problems with incompatibility of the software and equipment used to scan the ballots as well as the paper on which they were printed.

In 2022 the ballots were changed to an 8 x 11 pieces of paper, when in the past they had been printed on a heavy card stock. That allowed for some bleed through of votes that were then read multiple times by the scanning software.

That larger paper ballot also had to be folded in the mailing envelopes and straightened out for scanning causing errors.

Those are the reasons for the 940vote error in the 2002 election, Piatti said, adding that was discovered by the previous Elections Committee and they reported it to the Board.

Piatti said the new Elections Committee also reviewed years of historical documents, holding multiple work sessions and digging through filing cabinets.

The committee also talked with the printing contractor who has been printing and mailing the OPA’s election ballots for decades.

Another review was completed of the vendor of the software used to count the ballots, Snap Surveys. Piatti said the software is an optical character read for use with surveys, not an optical mark reader that is necessary to accurately count ballots.

He added that prior to 2022, the OPA also used a different scanner.

“We still have one more thing to do. We have to meet with the IT department,” he said, regarding new scanning software.

Piatti said the Election Committee was not lagging behind in its duties but added that it was difficult to work during the holiday season. Still, he said it submitted its initial report to the Board on Nov. 15, well before the Dec. 1 deadline. The Board then sent the committee more issues to investigate and questions to answer. “So we went back to work,” he said.

On Jan. 19, the committee rendered a second written report through its Board liaison, Rick Farr. That report was specific to addressing the ballot count and online voting. “We think we answered both,” he said.

Not all Board members agreed.

“What we asked to have done was not done by this committee,” Director Colette Horn said.

She argued that the Board asked the committee to look at all of the sources of voting, determine where the errors were, and what could be done to prevent them from happening again.

“We got nothing,” she said. “I’ve lost confidence in this committee.” She said the Board should look at the composition of the Elections Committee to make sure have it has the correct people on the committee.

Director Steve Jacobs said there is nothing in either of the Elections Committee’s two reports that suggests the committee talked to either the current vendor or any new vendor to address the electronic voting software problems to ensure the count is accurate.

“We have a potential problem but no discussion as to how to solve it with the current vendor or any prospective vendors,” Jacobs said.

He said he wasn’t even clear what exactly Piatti was presenting to the Board. He charged the committee with primarily doing Google searches about software vendors.

He said the committee may be right that it may not be the appropriate vendor for scanning the election ballots, but he said it was inappropriate to suggest a return “to pulling stuff out of filing cabinets” based on a Google search.

Jacobs was concerned about the Elections Committee holding meetings that were not open to the public and not posted.

He questioned whether the committee did the “deep dive” into the 2022 election problems that the Board requested.

“I’m not convinced that we have answered any of the questions that came up,” he said.

Instead the committee has created a new controversy by suggesting doing away with electronic voting, he said.

“We got a lot of information from that committee,” OPA President Doug Parks countered. ““To paint them as having done nothing is a little disingenuous,” Parks said.

Horn tried to cut him off, but Parks repeatedly called her out of order. It was a discordant note in the meeting. Parks is Horn’s successor as OPA president

Horn told Parks she didn’t say the committee “did nothing” but that the committee didn’t do the job assigned by the Board.

Most of the committee’s findings are based on work done by the prior election committee, she said.

She called out Parks for telling the previous Elections Committee members they could not talk with the OPA’s IT staff to try to resolve the issues that plagued the last election. That led to the resignation of the entire committee, she said.

Aside from the election challenges, Director Frank Daly said the Elections Committee’s slow progress is holding up another voting process, that of amendments to the declaration of restrictions in many sections of Ocean Pines.

He said the OPA needs to “move on that” but needs to make sure it has a system in place for the voting.

Daly pointed out that legal restrictions may prohibit electronic voting on changes to the restrictive covenants so that is not at issue.

And, he said, that process doesn’t involve the Elections Committee so there is no reason to continue holding up that process. He asked that the Board decide in the next 30 days whether to proceed with the vote of DR changes.

Joining in the critique of the committee during the Feb. 18 meeting was former director Amy Peck, who during the Public Comments segment said for months there had been nothing made public by the committee about the status of its probe into last summer’s election.