OK - Clerk and Recorder's office in upheaval

By Roberta Forsell Stauffer, of The Montana Standard Had he known what he was get ting into, Bill Driscoll never would have agreed to come out of retire ment to shepherd the Clerk and Recorder's office through the November election. Driscoll, 74, started the job Aug. 3, after Barbara Sullivan resigned in mid-July. And as far as he's con cerned, the council of commission ers can have his resignation any time it wants. `` I'd step down in a minute,'' a visibly shaken Driscoll said during an interview Wednesday in his office. `` But I don't have any choice but to stay. To walk out now would be the ultimate dirty trick.'' Driscoll's frustration stems from the county's computerized ballotreading system. He has no idea how to operate it, and neither does his staff. `` There's not a person in this office who knows beans about this election system,'' Driscoll said. `` All that knowledge went with Barbara Sullivan.'' Ballot-printing delays and staffing problems compound the situation. By law, absentee ballots were supposed to be available Friday, Sept. 22 -- 45 days before the elec tion. They probably won't be ready until next week. And on Sept. 20, Deputy Clerk Pam O'Leary started a medical leave after filing a discrimination complaint against Butte-Silver Bow County with the state Human Rights Bureau on Sept. 11. O'Leary's departure left the office with only three experienced clerks: Dan Walsh, Delores Weller and Patsy Johnston, who along with Mary McMahon, is vying for the top clerk post. Another long-time staffer, Helen Walsh, moved out in mid-July, the same day Sullivan announced her resignation. She had worked dou ble-duty as clerk and as secretary for the council of commissioners. She moved down to the chief execu- See CLERK, Back Page tive's office to focus solely on council duties. County Personnel Director Tim Clark had no comment on O'Leary's discrimination complaint or her employment status, only to say that she had not resigned, as was rumored. O'Leary declined to com ment as well. Human Rights Bureau Chief Kathy Helland said the agency has 180 days to investigate the com plaint and decide whether it has `` reasonable cause'' to believe dis crimination occurred. To move forward with prepara tions for the Nov. 7 election, Driscoll hired two full-time tempo rary clerks, Bonnie Lombardi and Dorrie Bolton. They started Sept. 22 and will work through the elec tion. Their first job was to prepare the absentee ballot mailing. Now all they need are the ballots. Election Systems and Software, the Omaha, Neb.-based vendor of the county's computerized ballotcounting system, is printing the ballots at its offices in St. Cloud, Minn. Driscoll was stalled in granting the company final approval to start printing the ballots because the Montana Supreme Court was asked last week to consider the legality of a jail-related ballot question. The court dismissed the challenge on Sept. 21. Karen Hinson, the account rep resentative who's handling the bal lot printing job, explained during a phone interview Wednesday that the process is time-consuming and she'd know within the next few days when ballots might start com ing off the presses. `` We are just in the initial stages,'' Hinson said. The printing process involves numerous originals due to the vari ous district boundaries for local and state races. And the company is working on ballots for many other places throughout the coun try as well. Hinson said she felt sorry for Driscoll. `` He's been out of the loop in elections for a long time, and he had no training on how that soft ware works. He's in a pickle,'' she said. Driscoll would agree. He said he's been studying the manuals since he started the job, but they're not much help. He may have to bring in someone to program the machine and to be there on election night. He said Hinson reassured him she'd help walk him through the process, and while she has helped, it isn't enough, he said. Sullivan had received specific training on how to operate the system, and Driscoll said he assumed when he took the job that other staff members would have learned how to run it during the eight years it's been used. `` It's inexcusable that someone wasn't trained in this system,'' he said. Driscoll had been clerk and recorder from 1975 until 1992, save for a few years as deputy clerk. He successfully used mechanical `` punch card'' machines in numer ous elections and said they could count 600 ballots a minute, com pared to the new system's 200-perminute capacity. The county no longer has the old system, however. As a result, Driscoll said he'll keep doing `` whatever it takes'' to get through this situation. `` We have to have an election. I'll keep working with these people so we can get some kind of ballots -- even if we have to count them by hand,'' he joked.

http://www.mtstandard.com/newslocal/lnews.html

-- Doris (groomlk@bellsouth.net), September 28, 2000