Ottumwa Tri Weekly Courier

ELECTION DELAYS.

Ottumwa does not seem to be the only city in Iowa that has to wait two or three days after elections to find out who was elected. This year the Iowa papers put in a whole week trying to find out the total vote on the state ticket and then gave it up as a bad job. They are now waiting for the official count to learn the pluralities on the state ticket. The inability to get complete returns was due to the delayed count in a few of the cities, which made it impossible to give full county returns during the week in which the election was held. Wapello was one of these counties. The full returns from all the city wards were not secured until Thursday. Mahaska county was another, and the delay there was due to the slow count in the city wards. The Oskaloosa Times says that one election board worked fifty-five hours before their returns were certified to the county auditor Thursday afternoon. The Times declares this to be inhuman and urges amending the law by supplying two sets of judges and clerks.

The Marshalltown Times-Republican agrees that it is inhuman to make the whole county wait fifty-five hours or a large part of that time for important news of an important result, but it believes that in cases of this kind it may be evidence of incompetence on the part of election officials. The Times-Republican adds:

"Perhaps the double board might hurry it a little but so long as boards are selected without particular attention to qualifications it may be doubted whether or not the shifts would hurry up matters a great deal. The pay for clerks and judges is not attractive to experts. It is a day laborer's wage and the average man who has a job is disinclined to look at the proffer of a place on the election board unless he has personal and particular reasons for being on.

But even with experts there is still unnecessary and vexatious delay. Something must be done, precincts split, machines installed, or at least some system and organization of election boards looking toward efficiency.

The point is that there is plenty of time now to plan relief measures before another general election is upon us. This same matter has been brought up repeatedly after elections, but no steps were taken while the vexatious delays were fresh in the memory, and afterwards the people promptly forgot all about it, until another election brought the same old delays.

When Ottumwa gets the waterworks matter settled this subject of voting machines or cutting up the city wards into precincts might profitably be given consideration."