Published: May 07, 2008 04:52 pm            

Indiana’s Lake County forced wait in Clinton-Obama race

The wait into Wednesday’s early hours for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s razor-thin Indiana victory to become clear hinged on a county that’s in many ways more connected with Chicago than the Hoosier state.

Barack Obama had looked for a big margin in northwestern Indiana’s Lake County, with its TV coverage from his hometown and its large black population, to make up for Clinton’s strength in the state’s mostly white and rural areas.

Lake County, the state’s second most populous with nearly 500,000 people, reported partial results only several hours after the polls closed as a large number of absentee ballots and a record turnout delayed the tallies.

According to unofficial tallies by The Associated Press, Obama had 73,693 Lake County votes to Clinton’s 56,770, or roughly 56 percent to 44 percent. Although Obama prevailed countywide, Clinton held onto a statewide win.

The slow counting drew national media attention and earned Lake County a rebuke from Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita.

“The Lake County election board is reminded that no matter how long the process was drawn out, the public and the media had the right to monitor the proceedings,” Rokita said in a prepared statement.

Rokita noted that “every other urban area of our state” uses hundreds of precinct workers in counting votes “to get results quickly and to stop suspicions from rooting and festering.”

Lake County election officials could not be reached for comment late Wednesday morning.

Gary Mayor Rudy Clay, an Obama supporter who is the Lake County Democratic chairman, told The Associated Press that voters in his city gave huge margins for Obama. But Clinton did well in other parts of the county as she and former President Bill Clinton made several campaign trips there in recent weeks.

“When you touch warm skin of voters you usually do well,” Clay said Wednesday. “I think she touched more skin.”

Lake County, which runs along the southern shore of Lake Michigan, is an amalgamation of steel mills and chemical plants in cities with large minority populations such as Gary and Hammond, along with numerous mostly white suburbs to the south.

Lake County is the state’s most diverse, with 26 percent of its population black and 14 percent Hispanic. The county has long been a Democratic stronghold and a key to the party’s hopes in statewide races. It accounted for nearly 10 percent of the state’s votes in the Clinton-Obama race.

Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott told CNN that the votes from his city were counted within a couple of hours after polls closed at 6 p.m. Central time and that he did not understand why it was more than four hours later before county officials released the first tallies.

Brian Vargus, a longtime political analyst from Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, said that going back 30 years, Lake County has often been late in delivering vote totals.

“There was always a feeling that nobody pays attention to us” in the rest of the state, he said. “Now they may be thinking they are getting some national attention, but there could be tons of reasons.”

State Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker said the release of Lake County’s voting totals was further delayed because voting materials are gathered in each of the county’s more than a dozen cities and towns before being sent to county offices.

Parker said he was confident that the vote count was handled appropriately. He said the Lake County sheriff and prosecutor were both at the county government center monitoring the process.

Lake County had some 11,500 early ballots cast for the primary — about three times the number cast in the 2004 primary.

Clay defended the county’s handling of the vote tally.

“Any time you vote an additional 11,000 early voters with the same number of staff that you have all the time, I think that the election board staff did a tremendous job in the time that they had to do it in,” he said.

        

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