Since Tuesday's election, residents and politicians have all been looking for someone or some agency to blame for the lengthy waits at polling places on Election Day.
However, the Office of Voter Registration and Elections claims the Prince William County government is not responsible for a shortage of voting machines on Election Day this Tuesday. Instead, the agency is taking responsibility for the shortage of voting machines, which resulted in residents waiting one to two hours to vote.
“We thought we had a handle on this election. We didn’t think it would be that much bigger than the 2008 election,” Vice Chairman of the Electoral Board Rick Hendrix said.
According to Hendrix, Prince William County provides all the funds needed for the election.
“They really do bend over backwards to help us out. Their cooperation is fantastic,” Hendrix said.
Rather, he admits that he and his colleagues simply underestimated voter turnout.
“We expected to have a higher than usual turnout, but we thought that our equipment would be able to handle the turnout without waits that long,” Hendrix said.
Besides thinking their current machines would be sufficient, the Electoral Board did not think it would be wise to switch out machines to a new system during a presidential election.
“We can’t buy the same machines by law. For us to increase the number of machines, we have to go to a new system entirely. We have to investigate and see what the new machines are,” he said.
When preparing for an election, Hendrix explained he and his board members examine election numbers to estimate where to station voting machines.
“The precincts don’t change a lot each year. We have an election often; we have an idea of the size of the precincts," Hendrix said. "If it’s a primary election, we don’t have as many as a general election.”
They used the 2008 election, in which voter turnout was historically high as an indicator of the numbers to expect during the 2012 election; but even that turnout fell short of voter numbers. It is not that a higher percentage voted; it is that the county population grew along with voter registration.
There were 30,899 more people registered to vote in the county in 2012 compared to 2008, according to the County's General Registrar Betty Weimer.
Hendrix acknowledged lines were long in many locations, but maintains it was not intentional, nor did it target any specific demographic.
“We had lines reported to be three hours long, at Alvey in Haymarket and a lot of lines at the other end of the county and in between. We haven’t yet figured out a pattern, but that’s the kind of thing we want to look at,” Hendrix said. “We’re going to investigate it pretty thoroughly though, once we get this election certified.”
On Tuesday, Woodbridge Board of County Supervisor Frank Principi accused Prince William County Executive Melissa Peacor of denying the Election Board a request for $350,000 for new voting machines. In actuality, the board never formally requested any amount more than $46,000.
Furthermore, in an email to the Board of County Supervisors, Peacor communicates that she directed Weimer to spend her entire budget of 1.4 million to conduct the presidential election and the county would provide more funds from the contingency reserve if needed.
Hendrix said that funding for the election was immaterial and not the cause of the lines at polling places.
For the next election, Hendrix plans to be ready, replacing the older machines with the newer models to which the state is transitioning.
“We’ll have to start moving in that direction. You don’t have to transition every precinct over at the same time. I would want to have everything in place the year before,” Hendrix said.
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