Published: July 24, 2008 10:09 am         

Clerk says Mineral vote count to run faster than in May

KEYSER, W.Va. - Although elections workers will still use a dot matrix printer in November, the results of the general election should be available a lot faster than the painfully slow process on the night of the May 13 primary.

"A laser printer is not compatible with the 650 machine," County Clerk Lauren Ellifritz told the Mineral County Commission on Tuesday.

The commissioners had asked Ellifritz, who also serves as the county's elections clerk, to look into the possibility of upgrading to a laser printer when it took the dot matrix printer more than an hour and 15 minutes to process the results of the early voting and absentee ballots on the night of the primary election.

The first precinct results were not available until approximately 10:15 p.m. and the entire process continued until almost 4 a.m.

Commissioner Cindy Pyles said the crowd that had gathered in the courthouse was getting quite restless and many of them had blamed the delay on the printer.

Ellifritz said it was not the printer that slowed the process to a crawl that night, but rather all the extra information that had been programmed into the machine.

"They had programmed the Mountain Party into the system, and that made the report a third longer than it needed to be," she said three days after the election.

She admitted that if she had known the process was going to take that long, she would have started earlier.

Tuesday, Ellifritz told the commissioners the ballot counting process will naturally be shorter because "it won't be broken down into parties."

"We won't have the same delays as last time, and we'll start counting the early voting earlier," she told them.

The general election will be held Nov. 4.

In other business before the commission Tuesday:

* Sheriff Gary White asked for permission to purchase an additional cruiser. He recently hired another deputy, Kevin McKone, and a couple of the department's cruisers are not functioning.

* At the request of Marc Bashoor, Mineral County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, the commissioners signed an application for the annual Emergency Management Planning Grant, which is used "to pay salaries and other expenses" at the county's 911 center.

* Bashoor reported that construction of the county's new 911 center on Pine Swamp Road "is still on schedule for a late November/early December delivery." After that, the county will begin moving its emergency operations into the new building.

Contact Liz Beavers at lbeavers@times-news.com.