LAKE PARK — Eric Schindler doesn’t dispute that he lost an election. 

What he wants to know is: who is entitled to cast ballots in city polls and who isn’t?

Schindler, the current mayor of Lake Park, lost to former mayor Keith Sandlin in the Nov. 6 general election — an election he said highlighted major problems in voter lists. He said he sent a complaint to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office outlining problems and asking for remedies.

Schindler said city voters complained of not getting to vote for mayor and council races when they went to the polls, while some people who lived outside of Lake Park reported getting mayor and council races on their ballots.

The mayor said the city should be able to look at voter lists to double check who is eligible for city elections and who isn’t.

“We don’t want to know how they voted,” he said. “We just want to make sure people who live in the city get to vote in city elections.”

The subject of some Lake Park voters allegedly being given wrong ballots was raised at a recent Lake Park City Council meeting.

Councilwoman Deborah Sauls said when she took part in early voting, she was given a ballot with no Lake Park races on it. Sauls said elections staff told her it was because she lived outside the city limits.

“How could I qualify for and get elected to City Council if I didn’t live in the city?” she said.

Sauls said she had to cast a provisional ballot, which “didn’t make me happy at all.” Provisional ballots are used for people whose eligibility to vote is in question, with the vote being counted after officials double check that eligibility.

City Clerk Tabitha Fowler said the problem was a “data entry mistake that (the elections board) can’t explain, and neither can I.”

The mayor said when he asked about reviewing the voter list, he was told by the elections supervisor it could take up to a month to get the list to the city.

Schindler said he wants the county board of elections to tighten its scrutiny.

“They obviously don’t know who does and doesn’t live in the city,” he said.

Schindler said county elections supervisor Deb Cox asked him for the names of individuals who had problems at the polls. 

Cox did not dispute what Schindler said but explained her rationale. 

Cox said she asked for the names to help sort out the problems, while Schindler said he didn’t give her the names because he “didn’t want anyone scrutinized.”

Cox said it was up to the city to provide her office with accurate voter information in the first place. 

“If it’s not right, it’s their problem,” she said.

She said she could only find three people who had ballot error problems in the Lake Park elections: two were provisional ballot votes that were fixed before the Nov. 6 election date, and the other was someone who had problems on Election Day and was given a provisional ballot to take care of things.

“No votes were cast in error that we could find,” Cox said.

Schindler, in his letter to the secretary of state’s office, said Georgia has an “antiquated system of keeping tabulations on candidates.”

On the issue of provisional ballots, the secretary of state’s office said Lowndes County had 1,174 provisional ballots in the election. Cox said only 541 of them were counted.

The rest weren’t counted because they had problems such as lack of approved identification and lack of registration in Lowndes County, she said.

Many university students from other parts of the state didn’t realize or understand they were registered in their home county, not Lowndes, Cox said.

She chalked up the more intense-than-usual provisional voting to heightened interest in the midterm elections, saying the voting levels more closely paralleled those of a presidential election.

Terry Richards is senior reporter at The Valdosta Daily Times.