Part One

The following examples of missteps by Tom Slockett  in his role as Johnson County Auditor is by no means exhaustive.  The information was compiled from multiple sources.












2004 presidential:  119 provisional ballots that should have been counted were discovered after the canvass. Auditor had BOS conduct a second "canvass" after the deadline, labeled a "report of ballot information."  (probably not legal).  Even if it is, this second result is not included in official secretary of state records.  So as far as the official record goes, those votes didn't  count. (The Auditor’s web site makes no mention of this except in buried in the minutes, and reports the extra-legal "report of ballot information" as the official result)

The Election deputy walked out on a work Saturday after an enraged outburst by Slockett six weeks before the election and was not replaced. Staff went through a then-record turnout presidential election with no elections deputy.

Voters were mailed duplicate ballots because the mailing labels were accidentally printed twice because Slockett was yelling at the person printing them out.  No question that some people may have voted twice, and others not at all.

The 2004 election went over budget by more than $100,000 in large part because Slockett was literally hiring temps off the street.  Many often stood there for hours until someone was able to get to them to give them something to do.

Changes in precinct boundaries (16 annexed/Scott) weren’t discovered until a few days before the election. Voters were mailed new ballots to reflect the different legislative districts, along with confusing instructions that led to replacing the “new” ballots on several occasions because people mailed in the wrong ballot.

The wrong winner was reported for Soil and Water Conservation Commission. This was due to Slockett preventing staff from testing returns before election night.  Tom had refused to include over and under votes in the reporting even though the Secretary of State's office told him he was required to. He caved at the last minute. Because Slockett held up decisions, staff were still programming the election night return boards two days before the election, when this should be done and tested two weeks before, and programmers had to work all day the Sunday before the election to fix this. 

Spring 2005: Slockett purchased touch screen voting equipment that was made illegal in Iowa in 2007. (Staff had expressed this concern and were ignored.)  This required purchase of new disability accessible equipment (the Automarks) in time for 2008  primary, and required lots of retraining first on the touchscreens and then on the Automarks. The Automarks were looked at but rejected in 2005. The touchscreens made election returns process more complex because staff were combining two sets of data for each precinct, which played a big role in the 2007 city election foul-up.

http://www.johnson-county.com/auditor/min/050503vote.htm

2005 City election—North Liberty Mayoral Race: incorrectly reported numbers of write-in votes led to a front-page headline of an incorrect winner and a months-long recount and election challenge.

The recount canvass was in violation of Iowa code because the Board of Supervisors did not vote to schedule it. Tom was informed of this but didn't want the Board to know he’d forgotten to tell them they needed to do this.  So the official canvass is really illegal.

Also in the 2005 city election, the ballot for Shueyville was incorrect. It listed four regular seats and one separate contest "to fill vacancy." At the time all five seats were two year terms so there should not have been a separate To Fill Vacancy race.  This, too could have led to an election challenge, but luckily for Slockett only four total candidates ran, all in the regular seats.


Copy of ballot.

Also in 2005 he finally became convinced that pollworkers, because the County pays them, had to have I-9 forms on file.  (He reprimanded at least one employee for doing this at one point before he became convinced.)  With about as many as 300 pollworkers working in a General Election, this was a daunting assignment, and some pollworkers didn’t comply.  Even though he was advised otherwise, Slockett put them on the job anyway.  He then violated NLRB law by notifying them that they could not have their paycheck until they came in and filed the form.

2006 primary - ballots were not available on first day for early voting; voters were turned away. This was also around this time Slockett began refusing to release satellite schedules until after the petition deadline. The public had to unnecessarily petition for UIHC because he became confused and couldn’t tell staff where he wanted satellite sites before the deadline.

2006-General Early votes were not properly counted and were copying over making the final election result unavailable until 12:30 am.

2006-Slockett resented the Secretary of State requiring all Counties in Iowa to use a new central voter registration database called I-Voters, even though a statewide system was required by a 2002 federal law.  He preferred to use his in-house system, very obsolete, called VoteFox.  For 9.5 months he required staff to enter and maintain voter records on both systems.  (The dual entry era lasted through two county-wide elections - (primary and school) - and two smaller special elections.)  This required hundreds, if not thousands of hours of unnecessary work and payroll.

Johnson County was the last county in state to use the state voter system.  All counties were required to switch to the new system by the end of 2005, but Slockett ordered staff to use the old system as the "official" data through October 2006.  It was a full-time job for one worker just to reconcile the two databases.  None of the staff who had to enter the data in the new system were taken to the State trainings on the system--even though other counties took all their elections staff.  Slockett took himself and a temporary elections deputy, who soon after left the post and was unavailable for help with this.  One of the workers who wasn’t allowed to go to the training was given the assignment to train others who’d not gone on the new system.  When that worker explained she didn’t know the new system because she’d not had training, she was handed a manual and told to “figure it out.”

Once Slockett finally agreed to switch over to the state database, in October 2006, he ordered staff to do so immediately. There was never a final data reconciliation between the new and old systems.

2007—The first 21 bar vote, first reported losing, then winning.  This was in part due to Slockett badgering staff to go faster when he thought it was taking too long to convert a text file to excel. Less than four weeks before the election, he ordered a new method for conversion, ignoring staff concerns, in an effort to speed up the process by less than a minute. With inadequate time to test, the process failed.

Multiple elections until 2010 special - satellite sites at Coralville City Hall and North Liberty Rec Center insufficiently staffed. Multiple deputies over the years had doubts about Slockett's policy of using one city front desk staffer to work these sites with other staff "available if needed", but were afraid to give Slockett any answer than the one he wanted. When local Republicans finally complained during the 2010 special election, the state elections director - ironically, one of Slockett's former election deputies, told him that the sites required three staff with party balance fully dedicated to election tasks.

Stay tuned for Part Two....