BALLOTS STILL BEING COUNTED IN CITY

As of noon Wednesday, ballots were still being counted for Ward 54, a Brady Street district that votes in the Cass Street School. [See update below -- Ed.] The 1400 ballots allotted to the ward were insufficient for the demand, and the City Election Commission printed out a batch of non-scannable paper ballots. These were then collected in a shopping cart, where hundreds accumulated between the hour of 6:30 p.m., when the originals ran out, and about 7:45 p.m. when a batch of scannable ballots finally materialized for the few remaining voters. Ald. Mike D'Amato was a presence in the polling place, having put out a similar electoral fire at the Maryland Avenue School earlier in the day. As the shopping cart filled with ballots, D'Amato handed out green registration cards to the endless stream of new voters of the ward. He said, good humoredly, that he fully expects to hear the talk radio people mention how D'Amato's iniquitous district is a place where ballots cast for Republicans are tossed into a basket and ground up for cattle bedding, or multiply like amoebae if for Democrats. The facts are more prosaic.
The paper ballots run up by the commission in the emergency are being re-created by Election Commission staff on scannable forms, and then run through the machines, explaining the delay in the count.
The ward voted 3-to-1 Democratic during the 2002 election.

UPDATE: Wednesday, 1:49 p.m. The votes are in at Ward 54. A total of 1,614 ballots were cast, meaning about 200 emergency ballots were cast, which seems right. In the governor's race, Doyle outpolled Green 1,151 to 412 in that heavily-democratic district.
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Amusing, isn't it, that the Republicans made such a stink in 2004 about Mayor Barrett's profligate ballot printing spree? Especially since the good burghers of Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold, ran out of the precious documents yesterday due to this misplaced economy measure.
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There is an interesting etiquitte to the closing of the polls, at least as practiced on Cass Street. The head election official stands at the door and announces, "Hear Ye, Hear Ye, The Polls are Closed!" It is an eighteenth-centuryism that is as unlikely to assault the ears of the terrestrial twenty-first centurite as would be "Ahoy!"

--Michael Horne