The bizarre election-day breakdown that made Chicago a worldwide laughingstock started a little after 6 AM on February 5, when Angela Burkhardt went to her polling place in the 42nd precinct of the 49th Ward, a firehouse at 1723 W. Greenleaf.
Burkhardt protested that nothing was certain except that the machine had taken the ballot. There was no evidence it had recorded her vote.
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So Burkhardt called technical assistance herself, only to find the line busy. She tried the board of elections again. This time she talked to an operator who took down her information but told Burkhardt not to follow up with more calls—it wasn’t her responsibility.
Burkhardt and Carlton exchanged numbers and “agreed to bother people until we got some answers,” as Carlton later wrote on her blog, rubbernun.net. Then Carlton walked over to the office of 49th Ward Democratic committeeman David Fagus. “I felt he should know about this,” she says.
The investigators opened the ballot-counting machine and removed 20 unmarked ballots. Then they tracked down all 20 would-be voters and notified them that they needed to vote again—this time using a real pen. According to Allen, at least 13 voters returned.
For his part, Fagus says, he sorted through the matter to see what went wrong. “There were five judges in the polling place—three Democrats and two Republicans,” he says. “Four had worked before, one had not.”
Wilson says this was his fourth stint as an election judge, and his first one at this polling place. “I’ve heard quite a few stories from other election judges,” he says. “Things happen, man.”
