(April 27, 2017) With the May 10 deadline for candidate filings looming, followed by the August election of two board members, the Ocean Pines Association Elections Committee reviewed procedures for counting ballots during its meeting on Friday.
The committee was reconstituted last fall after the 2016 election, making this contest a first for all five committee members.
As such, John Connell from B. Donald Kimball Inc. was brought in to demonstrate how the ballots are counted using a Scantron machine.
Kimball guessed Ocean Pines had used the machine for at least a decade. He has presided over the count during the last four or five elections, he said.
Paper ballots are mailed to homeowners in July and counted in August. This year the deadline to receive ballots is Aug. 10. Ballots will be counted on Aug. 11 and announced during the annual meeting on Aug. 12.
Small stacks, about a quarter-inch to a half-inch thick, are hand-fed into the machine. The Scantron reads the ballots and puts the results in a text file on an attached laptop computer. Kimball said the counting process generally takes about three hours.
The elections committee must be present during the counting to judge ballots not accepted by the computer, a rare occurrence.
In 2015, for instance, 6,707 ballots were counted and only 37 were rejected, representing just 0.005 percent of the total vote, according to former Elections Committee Chairman Bill Wentworth.
Thirty-one of those were not counted in the final tally that year. Two were rejected because they were mailed in improper envelopes, two were rejected because multiple ballots were mailed in a single envelope, five were blank, and 22 voted for more than the allowed number of candidates.
Rejected ballots are reviewed by all members of the elections committee.
On Friday, Connell and the committee members successfully tested all of the electronic ballot-counting equipment – after a few technical errors were remedied.
The committee also finalized candidate questions for the Ocean Pines Association’s summer newsletter.
With just shy of two weeks left before the candidate filing deadline, however, the election could be in jeopardy because of the low number of candidate filings.
Slobodan Trendic, the committee liaison to the board, said just two people had filed to run for the two vacancies as of Friday.
Current Elections Committee Chairman Steve Tuttle said Ocean Pines bylaws require at least two more candidates than vacancies.
“If the number of candidates on the list submitted to the elections committee is less than two more than the number of vacancies to be filled, the board of directors shall attempt to solicit sufficient candidates to bring the total number to at least two more than the number of vacancies to be filled,” Tuttle said, reading from Ocean Pines bylaws.
“If for any reason the number of eligible candidates available for the board of directors becomes less than the number of positions to be filled by the election, then the number of positions to be filled by the election shall be reduced to the number of candidates remaining.”
Any vacancies that remain after the election would be filled by board appointment.
As of last Friday, only former Director Marty Clarke and current Director Doug Parks had filed. Parks was appointed last year after a vacancy was created by the resignation of Pat Renaud.
Renaud’s seat would have been up for reelection this year. Board Vice President Dave Stevens, who would also be eligible for reelection, has decided not to run.  
The elections committee will meet again on May 12.