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By MARK GUYDISH; Times Leader Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 1997     Page: 3A

HAZLETON — Hazleton Area School Board candidate Betsy Durso was visibly
flustered when talking recently about what she saw when she reviewed Luzerne
County paper work from the May primary election:
   
Vote tally sheets with numbers written in pen and pencil, errors crossed
out, erased or covered with correction fluid, and a calculation that makes
what looks like “1” plus “0” add up to “6.”
    “It’s unbelievable, how they do things,” Durso said of the hodgepodge of
paper work the county uses to calculate the election winners.
   
Unbelievable perhaps, but legal and not uncommon, said Department of State
Press Officer Dave Hixson.
   
And frustrating, a county official added.
   
Durso has been struggling with the county’s election system since the May
20 primary, when she discovered she narrowly lost the Republican nomination
for a School Board seat to incumbent Tom Cipriano.
   
All candidates ran on both Republican and Democratic ballots this year, but
Durso and Cipriano are the only ones who didn’t win the nomination of both
parties.
   
Durso won on the Democratic ticket. She said her figures show her losing
the GOP bid by about 22. Luzerne County Voter Services Director Mary Ellen
Sacco did not have exact district totals but said Durso’s calculation is
“about right.”
   
Durso contends there were substantial discrepancies in two Hazleton wards
between vote totals recorded by her poll watcher and the vote totals reported
by the county. Last week, Luzerne County President Judge Joseph Augello
approved Durso’s request to open machines from the two wards.
   
But in researching the vote and her options for appeal, Durso has unearthed
some glaring flaws Sacco readily admits exist.
   
The votes are tallied at the polling site by the judge of elections. As the
votes are read from the machine, several copies of the tally sheets are filled
out: one to post on the door of the polling site for public view, one each for
the majority and minority election inspectors elected by the general public,
and one “open” and one sealed sheet returned to the county election bureau.
   
The redundancy is designed to catch errors at the polling site and
courthouse, where the sealed sheets are compared to the open sheets.
   
But the system can and does backfire, Sacco said. In one Pittston race,
totals in a machine were the “exact opposite” of those on the tally sheet
handed in to the county.
   
There are no state or county rules on how to fill out the tally sheets, so
the workers can and do write the numbers in pen and pencil, correcting errors
with erasers or fluid, or by simply crossing them out.
   
“Some of those people have been there all day, and then they have to write
down the numbers. On top of that, you have tons of people watching at the
polls,” Sacco said.
   
Requesting a recount is a candidate’s best bet against errors, because
county officials open the machines and tabulate the votes themselves. But
Durso ran into a problem in her push for a recount. State law allows different
counties to set different deadlines for candidates to request recounts.
   
Hazleton Area School District covers parts of three counties, each tallying
votes at different times. By the time official tallies were available for all
three counties, the deadline for a recount request in Luzerne County had
passed. Durso filed for a recount in the two wards in question anyway and won.
   
Sacco said the time differences between counties can cause headaches for
her as well. She didn’t receive a certified count from Carbon County until
Thursday for the Hazleton Area School District. And because of recounts being
done in Luzerne, she still can’t send a certified total of Luzerne votes for
the Berwick School District to Columbia County.
   
For Durso, the whole experience has been a real eye opener.
   
“If people knew how things are done, some of them wouldn’t even vote,”
Durso said.