Voting smooth despite glitches

By Robert P. King

Palm Beach Pos Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Electronic cards got stuck in voting machines.

Pricey touch-screen gizmos weren't working when voters showed up to cast their ballots.
Just call it Election Day in Palm Beach County.

Amid low turnout, a scattering of glitches marred an otherwise calm round of municipal voting Tuesday in the county that threw the mother of all botched elections six years ago. The foul-ups left some voters frustrated, though they came nowhere near the epic scope of 2000's presidential meltdown.

"On the whole it was very successful," said Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson, who expressed one disappointment: "I would like to have seen some lines." Anderson said the most frequent complaint concerned cards that wouldn't properly activate the machines, usually because nobody had cleaned grime off the cards' magnetic strips. Other voting machines needed rebooting in midday, Anderson said, and some polling places opened later than 7 a.m., deputy elections chief Charmaine Kelly said.

"By now we should have this under control," fumed West Palm Beach lawyer Rand Hoch, who said he showed up at the city library after 9 a.m. only to find two of three voting machines not working. "We should have the best voting equipment anywhere in the world. I guess we still don't." Anderson said he didn't know any details of what happened at the library.

In Royal Palm Beach, Tom Bonney said he tried to vote about 7:30 a.m. at the village Cultural Center, only to have a poll worker tell him, "We're not ready for you yet." But the West Palm Beach police officer had to fly to Tallahassee, so he missed his chance to vote.

"To me it's kind of inexcusable," he said. "How many people weren't able to vote before me?" Village Clerk Mary Anne Gould disputed Bonney's timing, saying the polling place was "up and running" when she checked at 7:07 a.m. But she acknowledged it opened late, causing someone to complain to Anderson's office.

Meanwhile, card errors frustrated voters such as William S. Piispanen, a Pahokee resident who yelled at the top of his lungs to insist on his right to vote ? prompting Fire Chief Gary Burroughs to ask him to calm down or leave.

"I said: 'I'm not creating a disturbance. I want everybody to know there's a problem with the machines,' " Piispanen said.

He said his problems started when one machine repeatedly spit out his card, a second machine called the card "invalid," and then poll workers claimed he had voted when he asked for a new card.

Burroughs said Piispanen kept shouting even as poll workers were trying to help him. "I just don't think he needed to be so boisterous about it," the chief said.

Lake Worth City Commission candidate Cara Jennings said she got a similar "invalid card" error when she first tried to vote. Voting reform activist Echo Steiner said she saw other voters having the same problem at the polling place on Lucerne Avenue.

Steiner also complained that Anderson had stopped the longtime practice of posting a copy of each precinct's results outside the polling places. Anderson said that was partly because people were swiping them, but the results will be available at his office.

Steiner said poll workers prevented people who distrust the touch-screen machines from casting paper "provisional" ballots.

Kelly said the provisional ballots are solely for people who lack identification or whose eligibility to vote is in question.