Wanda Himel thought she may have caught an elections worker committing voter fraud.
While working as a poll watcher for her son, Assumption Parish Police Jury candidate Josh Himel, in the Nov. 18 runoff election, she heard a poll worker say she had to vote for herself near the end of the night.
She watched the worker emerge from the first booth she went into and tell a co-worker the light was "lit up." She went into the booth nearby, "did what she had to do in that box" and then a co-worker told her to go back into the prior booth she had just left "and she did her voting," Himel told a parish panel.
Wanda Himel says it looked like the worker may have voted more than once.Â
"It was suspicious to me, and that's why I reported it," Himel recently told the parish Board of Election Supervisors in Napoleonville.Â
Her son lost the election by nine votes, 491 to 482.
Wanda Himel filed a complaint with the parish clerk of court, though Josh Himel did not seek a recount or file a formal elections challenge of the results.
After an investigation, officials said the worker did in fact go into two booths — but it wasn't what it looked like.
The poll commissioner, Pauline Peterson, said she had voted once for herself. In the other booth, she found that another voter had made all their selections, but had forgotten to press the "cast ballot" button.
All Peterson did was press that one button to actually submit the voter's ballot, officials said. Her reference to the machine being "lit up" indicated the last button had not been pressed, because the light goes out once the votes are cast, officials said.
"I, Pauline M. Peterson, did not change any selections made by the previous voter," Peterson said in a statement read by Clerk of Court Erin Hebert. "All I did was hit the 'cast your vote' button and the light went off, so we proceeded with the closing of the poll as normal."
Information from election day voter log books, voting machine audit information and Wanda Himel's own tally of the vote corroborated Peterson's and Jackson's accounts of what happened, the parish elections officials said. They didn't show a discrepancy between the number of voters who signed in, 193, and the number of voters counted by the machines that day, also 193.
If someone had voted twice, the numbers would not have aligned, Hebert and other elections board officials concluded.Â
Also, Wanda Himel told the panel that when she arrived at the polls around 7:30 p.m., 188 people had already voted and only four more voted before she saw Peterson go into the two booths at the end of the night.
That means, based on Himel's own count, 192 people had voted in the precinct before she saw Peterson go into the booths.
Based on Himel's numbers, had Peterson voted twice, the machine-recorded voter tally for the precinct should have been 194, not the 193 voters that the machines did record.
The elections board unanimously declined to take any disciplinary action against Peterson and another poll worker in connection with the complaint.
Hebert said the state training manual for poll workers instructs them to press the "cast ballot" button so the selections are counted, after informing at least one other commissioner.Â
Board of Elections Supervisor Dianne Cheavious, a gubernatorial appointee, asked Brenda Jackson, the other poll worker, why she didn't notice the cast ballot button hadn't been pressed when the voter left the booth.
Pressing the button causes an audible ring and Cheavious noted poll workers often won't let people leave the booth until the button is pressed.
Jackson said that, at the time, she was going from one machine to the other and couldn't hear the ring due to noise in the precinct.
"They were talking so loud, you couldn't hear," Jackson said.
Josh Himel, a Republican, said he didn't believe the two poll workers' accounts matched and remained skeptical about their explanation. But he also accepted the outcome.
"According to them, you know, they did everything by law. I don't know the voter laws, but if that's the law, we can't argue with it, whether we agree with it or not," Himel said.
Himel has also filed a separate complaint with the parish registrar of voters claiming some of the people who cast ballots don't actually live in the district.Â
Yoselin Jackson, the registrar, said that complaint has been forwarded to investigators with the Louisiana Secretary of State's compliance unit. The secretary of state's office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation into the registration allegations, spokesman John Tobler said.
Ron Alcorn, the incumbent police juror, said he wasn't aware of the allegations surrounding the vote nor the voter registrations until contacted by a reporter, saying he doesn't "buy into small talk."
"I ran a clean race. The voters spoke and, you know, that's what it is, man. I don't know what else to tell you," Alcorn said.Â
