Error of omission is corrected

It was 12:30 Wednesday morning. Polls had been closed for more than four hours, and a Boston election worker in a second-floor City Hall office was conducting one of the final steps in the highly regimented process of calculating final election results.

The worker read vote tallies written in documents called clerks' books from 73 precincts in the Second Suffolk District Senate race, then entered them on a computer. But as officials reviewed the results, there seemed to be something amiss.

``We saw there were a bunch of zeros," said Michael Galvin, the city's chief of Basic City Services, who oversees the Elections Department.

In the following hours, officials would discover that eight precinct wardens had failed to record tallies in the books. The mayor was notified. Meetings were held.

Yesterday, as the ballot boxes from those precincts were unsealed and the votes tallied in a public counting at City Hall, officials said they planned to investigate why the problems occurred. Some critics raised questions about the city's screening and training process for poll workers.

``I haven't seen anything like this where the votes were not counted on election night," said Burton Nadler, a Boston lawyer who specializes in election law and said he worked for the Democratic National Committee during the 2000 Florida recount. ``It's astonishing to me."

A city lawyer at the counting said the Election Department did exactly what the law mandates in such a situation. It notified the secretary of state's office Wednesday morning and asked an election official there to get a court order to unseal and count the ballots.

``The city has followed the letter of the law," said the lawyer, Mark Sweeney. ``We discovered an error early on, and we're working together with the secretary of state's office to correct it."

Boston election officials said the city's handling of this week's problems was considerably better than of a primary in 2003, when Nancy Lo, then the election commissioner, reportedly opened sealed ballot boxes to retrieve missing tally sheets or clerk's books. Lo has since been replaced, and officials said yesterday that poll worker training has been increased from two hours to three.

Some 1,525 paid poll workers were employed by the city for Tuesday's primary election, officials said. All had attended at least one training session, they said.

One hundred forty-six clerks and wardens were assigned to work in 73 precincts located in the Second Suffolk District. Those poll workers were given training with a focus on hand-counting write-in votes, since all four candidates in the race were write-in candidates, the officials said.

As voters cast ballots, they were to write in the names and addresses of their chosen cadidates or apply special stickers with the information and then mark an oval next to the name . The ballots were fed into counting machines.

Since the machines cannot count write-in votes, precinct wardens and clerks were supposed to open the machines, hand-count the ballots and enter the vote tallies in clerk books, election officials said. Then the ballots were to be put in boxes that would be sealed at the precinct and carried with the books to City Hall by police officers.

At the eight precincts in question, no tallies of hand-counted votes had been written in the clerk books, election officials said.

``We kept looking; did we look on the wrong page?" Galvin said. ``Sixty-five did it right, but these eight got it wrong."

The Election Department continued to investigate why that happened, the officials said. In at least one case, a precinct warden wrote hand-counted vote tallies on a sheet of paper that was sealed inside a ballot box. In other cases, the votes may have simply not been counted, they said.

It was the latest embarassment for an agency already under scrutiny. Last year the US Justice Department sued the city, alleging that election workers improperly influenced and coerced Hispanic and Asian-American voters with limited English skills. City officials settled the suit, agreeing to federal oversight of elections through 2008, to provide more training for poll workers, and to make available election material in more languages. In 2003, the secretary of state said there were numerous violations of election regulations in the September preliminary election.

A spokesman at the Department of Justice said yesterday that federal observers found problems during Tuesday's election, but he declined to be more specific.

``We raised a number of matters with the city during the day, and we'll continue to work with them," said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the department's Civil Rights Division.

Some voting rights advocates gave the Election Department high marks this week, despite workers' apparent failure to record all the votes.

``It seems like the Election Commission in Boston has made big strides," Avi Green, executive director of MassVOTE, said. ``They found an important error and they're fixing it."

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.