Trejbal: Montgomery County elections officials should resign
Another botched election
Christian Trejbal
Trejbal is a Roanoke Times editorial writer. He is stationed at the paper’s New River Valley Bureau.
For the third year in a row, Montgomery County Registrar Randy Wertz has found a way to bungle the general election. If he and the members of the county electoral board — Dean Dowdy, Cynthia Chappelka and Helen Young — had any sense of shame or conscience, they would resign.
November 14, 2010 - 10:13 AM
Quite simply, this has got to stop. If the county electoral board will not do the job correctly, the the state electoral board should step in and fix the problems. If neither of those groups can be counted upon to fairly represent the interest of voters, then they all need to go!
This is not about political parties, nor is it about who you like personally. It is about voting rights of every single registered voter and potential registered voter. It is about our rights as Americans. We have a right to expect these officials to take our rights seriously and not ignore problems.
I mostly agree with the above post, although in at least one case, it WAS about political parties. There was little doubt when Wertz tried intimidating Virginia Tech students into not voting in Blacksburg, he knew which party they were statistically more likely to support that year. If I remember correctly, Wertz is a Republican. In addition to incompetent, Wertz appears to have been partisan in his conduct. That incident alone should have resulted in his ouster. A whole string of incidents is utterly inexcusable for the electoral board.
I was one of the Blacksburg residents who were told to fill their name in on a yellow legal pad and then go vote. I knew enough to ask why there were no paper voter books and if I shouldn’t perhaps cast a provisional ballot. I was told to go ahead and vote. The registrar SHOULD resign. This has nothing to do with party politics and everything to do with confidence in our system of elections.
So what would have happened if one of those people, or several, had been ineligible to vote? Would we even know? Like the results or not, people MUST have confidence in the election process and when that is tainted, for good or ill, the head at the top is the one that needs to be held accountable. I am sure those “older workers” are cozy under that bus.
I was a poll worker/Precinct Chief for five years. I was taught by Sandra Chapin and every worker knew their job. Passing the blame to “aged” workers is simply not taking responsibility for inefficiency by the Registrar. The registrar refers to 15 work sessions (maybe that is done now) but the workers (when I trained) have 1 work session before each election. I was an observer at the last May Town election and a statement was “don’t you trusted us” – after all that has happened this question has been answered. How much has it cost to train these workers? In the past it has been $100 to work election day and extra $25 for the training session – was each person paid $25 or more for each work session – quite a bit and to blame “aged” workers!!! Sounds as if they were not trained correctly but Registrar and Electoral Board are not taking responsibility for this.