Who's minding the polls?

WITH JUST three contested legislative races in Boston on Tuesday, the city's Election Department still managed to make a total shambles of one of them. The Second Suffolk Senate race posed some unusual Election Day challenges, but nothing complicated enough to justify the failure to properly account for write-in ballots in eight of 73 precincts.

None of the four candidates' names appeared on the ballot. Even the eventual winner, state Senator Dianne Wilkerson, had failed to collect sufficient signatures for her name to appear. So voters were required to write in or paste in a sticker with the name of their preferred candidate, in addition to marking an oval next to the name. The fact that more than 11,000 voters made the effort to do so speaks well of the district covering much of Boston's minority neighborhoods. The fact that poll workers couldn't deliver the ballots accurately or on time speaks poorly of the city's capacity to train its election workers.

This appears to be more that a simple case of election workers who mistakenly locked their signed tally sheets in the ballot boxes. There is no evidence that ballots were counted at all in at least two of the precincts, according to Secretary of State William Galvin, who termed it a ``grievous error." In another precinct, says Galvin, votes were tallied but not signed by a warden.

It was already clear in May, when Wilkerson muffed her signature drive, that things would get sticky. Shortly before Labor Day, Galvin's office, which is responsible for smooth and fair elections, convened Boston Election Department workers and the candidates themselves for a session on the proper procedure for write-in votes. Mayor Thomas Menino says that all of the roughly 300 special poll workers in the district received at least one and as many as three trainings from the city. Yet the quality of that training obviously left much to be desired. And the blunder is even more stunning because the Election Department and Commissioner Geraldine Cuddyer were fresh from a negotiated settlement with the US Justice Department for failure to train and recruit bilingual election workers.

Menino accomplished his first goal, which was to arrive at a fast and accurate count. The deadline is looming to enable a challenger to gather enough signatures for a possible recount. Now , Menino says, city officials will investigate what went wrong. But the public shouldn't settle for a city-led investigation, especially one headed by the Election Department. Irregularities plague this area of city government. The secretary of state's office is the right place to launch such a probe. And with the final election just over six weeks away, there is no time to waste.