11.17.06

More Williamson County Election Problems - Debra Stacy Resigns!

Posted in Election 2006, Williamson County at 2:15 pm by wcnews

One of the hallmarks of a good leader is to hire people that are smarter than they are. That doesn’t seem possible for Williamson County, at least as far as the Elections Administrator position is concerned, Williamson County elections administrator resigns. AGAIN!!?

Amid questions about the counting of electronic votes in the Williamson County elections, Elections Administrator Debra Stacy resigned today. The county is now re-counting electronic votes from early voting.

County spokeswoman Connie Watson said it is unclear whether the outcomes of the election will be affected, and the county does not yet know if Election Day votes will need to be re-counted as well.

Stacy submitted a one-sentence e-mail that said her resignation would be effective at 5 p.m. Monday. She did not give a reason, Watson said.

On Thursday, election judges in Williamson County raised questions about discrepancies in precinct-by-precinct totals. Stacy signed a court order today to recount the early voting totals.

Earlier in the week, the county said early electronic votes had been accidentally recorded three times each.

The county has held that the errors were a result of the elections software. After the software company, Election Systems & Software Inc., reviewed an audit trail of the 82 machines used, the company reported that the errors were the fault of county workers.

Watson said that after seeing the results of the company’s analysis, it was apparent that the problems were probably due to human error.

Questions were also raised during early voting by Republican Valerie Covey’s campaign for Precinct 3 county commissioner about whether straight-ticket votes were correctly input in a vote for her as commissioner because the result did not immediately show up on the screen.

Wow, she left in a hurry. A very close election, votes counted more than once, and a partisan hack as the elections administrator. (By the way, here’s what she said when Cliff Borofsky resigned):

Debra Stacy, elections manager for the county, will step in as acting elections administrator.

“At this point, it really doesn’t matter,” Stacy said of Borofsky’s resignation. “We all know what’s going on, and we have a lot of experience here.”

Apparently not. They better watch out, people are going to start thinking something fishy is going on here. It sure would be nice to have someone in power in Williamson County that wasn’t a Republican so there could an investigation of the elections office. Have I ever mentioned the lack of accountability in the government in Williamson County? Looks like something else the new Commissioners Court could put on it’s plate. Hey, I know, how about a bipartisan group to look at this office? Something needs to be done.

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