Sprinkler floods West Town polling place, ballots believed safe

CHICAGO - A faulty sprinkler system flooded a West Town polling place Tuesday afternoon, forcing voters to relocate to a new site.

The Chicago Board of Elections announced that the polling place at James Otis Elementary, 525 N. Armour St., was flooded about 3:45 p.m., and directed voters in the 37th precinct of the 1st Ward to vote at the Goldblatt’s Building, 1615 W. Chicago Ave.

“We’ll make every effort to make sure that we secure and recover every single ballot,” CBOE spokesman Jim Allen said at a news conference. “We don’t think there were damaged voted ballots because those would already be in the scanner.”

“I would doubt those were in a lot of trouble, and even if some water did get into the scanner, it might be the top few of those ballots in the ballot box,” Allen said. “But nonetheless we’re going to take care to make sure that we safeguard all those documents and use tamper evident seals to seal up all those ballots and get them out of there and make sure we preserve all the records from the polling place.”

In an email, James also said the newest scanners “capture the image of each ballot as it’s being cast by the voter, which allows us to compare that to the paper ballots in the event any water reached the ballots and either caused them to warp or affected the voter’s marks.”