These special elections are costing money

Great article from the Daily Journal

http://djournal.com/pages/story.asp?ID=272591&pub=1&div=News

Election costs strain county budgets 5/1/2008 5:09:44 AM
Daily Journal 

It will cost nearly $1 million to hold both the April 22 special election and the May 13 runoff.
COUNTIES SPECIAL RUNOFF

Alcorn $20,000 $18,000
Benton $7,700 $7,700
Calhoun $14,000 $14,000
Chickasaw $8,000 $8,000
Choctaw $6,800 $6,800
Clay $10,000 $10,000
DeSoto $35,000 $30,000
Grenada $12,500 $12,000
Itawamba $7,800 $7,800
Lafayette $12,500 $12,000
Lee $65,000 $45,000
Lowndes $25,000 $18,000
Marshall $12,000 $10,000
Monroe $25,000 $25,000
Panola $12,500 $12,500
Pontotoc $21,000 $21,000
Prentiss $9,000 $9,000
Tate $16,500 $16,500
Tippah $10,000 $10,000
Tishomingo $20,000 $15,000
Union $10,000 $10,000
Webster $9,000 $9,000
*Winston Unavailable Unavailable
Yalobusha $17,000 $6,000
TOTAL $386,300 $333,300
Sec of State $130,900 $130,900
GRAND TOTAL $517,200 $464,200
* Winston County had only one precinct.

By Emily Le Coz
Daily Journal

TUPELO - North Mississippi might have saved more than a quarter of a million dollars had the names of two inactive congressional candidates been pulled from the April 22 ballots.

 Instead, the 24-county district will hold a costly runoff election this month that many say could have been avoided had Democrat Steve Holland and Republican Glenn McCullough Jr. been able to remove their names from ballots.

The two had withdrawn from the race to replace former U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker in the next term after losing a primary election April 1. The special election, held three weeks later, was for the chance to fill the remainder of Wicker’s current term - that’s the one the candidates wanted to ditch.

But Attorney General Jim Hood issued an opinion saying that the ballots already had been printed and so under state law it was too late to remove the names.

As a result, Holland received 782 votes and McCullough got 957 in the special election. And the two front-runners, Republican Greg Davis and Democrat Travis Childers, have been forced into a May 13 runoff because neither won more than 50 percent of the vote.

Also on the ballot were the Green Party’s John Wages, who got 397 votes, and independent Wally Pang, who earned 724 votes.

Childers came within 410 votes of winning. And many say that if Holland and McCullough had been off the ballot, those votes would have gone to the front-runners, and either Childers or Davis could have won the majority.

“If those two guys had been off the ballot, we wouldn’t have had a runoff, that’s for sure,” said Benton County Circuit Clerk Kathy Graves. “It would have been cheaper and quicker. Our little county is eating it up. It has a huge impact on us.”

It cost Benton County $7,700 to hold the special election and will cost the same amount for the runoff, Graves said. Compare that to the roughly $700 it would have required simply to reprogram the voting machines and remove the inactive candidates’ names.

It’s the same story districtwide, where county officials are reporting tens of thousands of dollars in expenses to run another election versus just a few hundred or a few thousand to reorder ballots or reprogram voting machines.

Combined, the district’s counties will spend more than $333,000 to hold the runoff election.

“It seems as though it would have been cheaper to reprint the ballots, had we known what we know now,” said Lee County Circuit Clerk Joyce Loftin, who said the runoff election will cost her county an estimated $45,000.

Lee is one of three counties in the district that doesn’t use the statewide voting machines. Along with DeSoto and Yalobusha counties, Lee uses paper ballots from a Jackson-based distributor. It would have been expensive to order new ballots, Loftin said, estimating a price tag of about $7,000. But that’s still far cheaper than the $45,000 cost of holding a new election.

A majority of election costs come from having to pay election commissioners and poll workers, as well as renting polling space, ordering supplies and paying county employees overtime for helping with the election.

The state also incurs some cost because it handles the polling machines for counties that use them, said Pamela Weaver, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office. Its expenses for the special and the runoff elections are estimated at $130,900 each.

Combined, the Secretary of State’s Office and all the counties in the 1st Congressional District spent more than $510,000 in the special election and will spend more than $460,000 in the runoff - nearly $1 million combined.

“We don’t make the laws, we only follow them,” Weaver said. “That was up to the attorney general to make that decision” to keep the names on the ballot.

But the special election and runoff aren’t the only expenses. The state and counties also had to pay for the March 11 primary election and April 1 primary runoff, which most officials say cost even more than the special election and its runoff. They’ll also have to pay for the upcoming Nov. 4 general election and a potential runoff.

“I’ve got three budgets for my office - court, office and elections,” said Graves in Benton County. “And that election budget is probably going to be several years’ worth. I don’t think they realize that high up. It’s astronomical the effect on us.”

Contact Daily Journal city reporter Emily Le Coz at 678-1588 or emily.lecoz@djournal.com.