The intrigue began early on Tuesday morning, when Buffalo Schools Superintendent James Williams reportedly called in to the Erie County Board of Elections office to complain he’d had difficulty casting a write-in vote at his polling place. The complaints mounted throughut the day—trouble with write-ins at Trinity Episcopal, trouble with write-ins in the North District—until, by midafternoon, reports of malfunctioning machines and possible fraud had made their way onto local radio news stations.

Only two conclusions can be drawn from the alleged problems voters faced in Tuesday’s elections for the Buffalo Board of Education: one, a lot more Buffalonians wrote in the names of candidates, or tried to, than do usually, and two, Williams voted for Jayne K. Rand. Or tried to. Williams after all, lives in the Central District in a downtown high-rise that hardly suggests long-term plans —school superintendents are, after all, a migratory lot— and Rand had been knocked off the ballot by aggressive challenges to her nominating petitions just two weeks before election day. So unless Williams was confused about who the candidates were in his district (and many voters were, according to one election inspector) or writing in his own name (as one Artvoice staffer planned to do), he must have been trying to vote for Rand.

One challenge to Rand’s petitions was made by agents of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, whose favored candidate, Mary R. Kapsiak, won the Central District Seat with 703 votes. (Less than five percent of the city’s eligible voters typically vote in school board elections. Tuesday was typical: Fewer than 7,000 of about 162,000 eligible voters went to the polls, or about four percent.) That challenge was eventually withdrawn; though there were some discrepancies among the more than 900 signatures Rand collected, the BTF acknowledged that there were enough valid signatures to put her over the 500-voter threshold to get on the ballot.

The less forgiving challenge came from operatives of Grassroots, the political club whose best-known product is Mayor Byron Brown. Grassroots combed through every signature and managed to disqualify more than 700, mostly based on the single most specific piece of information required: the election ward. In addition to being a registered voter in the City of Buffalo, a petition signer must provide a valid address in the candidate’s school board district (Central, Ferry, North, etc.), his or her councilmanic district (Ellicott, Niagara, etc.) and also his or her correct ward within that district(the number on the machine at which you vote).

Candidates for Buffalo’s school board elections are the only candidates in the county who must provide such specific information. Although Rand was assisted in preparing her petitions by some seasoned political hands, her signatures could not withstand the relentless scrutiny of the Grassroots operatives and lawyers. She mounted a challenge in New York State Supreme Court last week, but to no avail; Kapsiak and Grassroots’ favored candidate, Joyce E. Nixon, were the only names on the ballot in Central District on Tuesday. Nixon pulled in 565 votes. Friends of Rand stood outside polling places, handing out directions on how to do a write-in ballot, but Rand came up short: She received about 230 write-in votes.

At least, that’s how many she received in her Central District. An election inspector at a polling place in the North District (for school board purposes; Delaware District for Common Council purposes) suspects Rand may have received a few write-in votes at her post, too. “There was some confusion about districts,” the inspector said, explaining that many voters, especially those interested in writing in a candidate’s name, seemed not to know who was running in which district. “But then, who does?” the inspector added.

At one point on Tuesday afternoon, according to the inspector, a write-in voter dropped the pencil that’s provided inside each booth. The pencil lodged point-first in the slot along wigh the voting booth lever travels, jamming it and disabling the machine. (To perform a write-in vote, you pull the curtain closed, open up a small metal window at the top left of the panel and use the pencil to write in the name of your candidate. Then you pull the lever to open the curtain and register your vote.)

As per the protocol in which they are trained, the attending inspectors called the downtown office of the Erie County Board of Elections to inform officials of the problem. Then they began to distribute “emergency ballots”—that is to say, paper ballots, with the names of each candidate as well as a blank space for write-in votes. “Much easier to understand” than the slidingmetal window method for write-in votes, said the inspector. Nonetheless, the switch to paper ballots wrought much confusion: Some voters believed they were being told they could not vote; some believed they were being told they could not write in a candidate’s name; some believed that they were being told the polling place had run out of ballots and everyone should go home.

Indeed, most of the reported problems Buffalo voters had registering write-in votes probably had more to do with understanding the process than with mechanical failures or political conspiracies. (At least three Artvoice staffers successfully cast write-in ballots in their districts; a fourth, the one who planned to vote for himself, refused to disclose whether he’d succeeded in doing so.)

Eventually a technician dispatched by the Board of Elections arrived, removed the offending pencil and fixed the machine; it was apparently the first time he’d seen the problem, which may be counted as further evidence that write-in voting is rare in Buffalo.

But not in this election. Though Rand couldn’t make a race of it, apparently retired Buffalo schools teacher Fred Yellen did. Yellen was a late entry in the North District race, where Catherine Nugent Panepinto had been running unopposed. Panepinto, who was handpicked to run for the seat by retiring school board member Donald Van Every, was alone on the ballot and received 697 votes. Yellen’s write-in votes have not yet been counted and probably won’t be until Monday or Tuesday. But there were a total of 744 write-in votes and absentee ballots in the North District, more than enough to outstrip Panepinto’s tally.

Ralph Hernandez, who was re-elected on Tuesday to the West District seat, won as a write-in candidate in 2004, when there were no names on the ballot because everyone’s nominating petitions were disqualified. So Yellen has a slim hope of joining Hernandez, Kapsiak, Pamela D. Cahill (Ferry District), Vivian O. Evans (East District) and Louis Petrucci (Park District), as well as the three at-large members whose seats were not up for election, on the school board on July 1.

“I am proud to say we did not lose a vote,” said the North District election inspector, who is being granted anonymity for no good reason at all. Even the woman who dropped the pencil and jammed the lever filled out a paper ballot, just in case.