Problems, recount issues confront elections officials

By DENISE ZOLDAN

March 11, 2004

Collier County's elections supervisor got a surprise Wednesday morning.

When Jennifer Edwards went to bed after Tuesday night's Democratic presidential primary and Marco Island City Council elections, the Marco voting numbers had certain totals. When she got up Wednesday, those numbers had changed.

"We looked at the Web site this morning and said, 'Why is this different?'" Edwards said.

In what some officials are still calling a successfully handled election process, one precinct of Marco Island's seven precincts was left out of the totals. And not until morning did Edwards find out.

"It was a mistake," she said.

In the close-call race, the missing precinct was a problem.

While the machines indicated all the precinct information was there, all the data had not been included when elections officials began handing out the results, which did not show precinct-by-precinct totals.

But there were other problems in the election process including that no one anticipated a potential recount in the Marco race or how a recount should be handled.

Another problem occurred during the Democratic primary count when poll workers at two precincts failed to bring back parts of the electronic balloting equipment, meaning the full count took hours longer.

And after the polls close at 7 p.m., poll workers at 80 precincts must physically drive the electronic voting data to one of 13 precincts where the data are sent to the elections office over phone lines.

When the Collier County canvassing board dismissed for the night at about 10:15 p.m. Tuesday, not all the precinct data were in.

On the other hand, in Lee County, which had a countywide presidential primary and elections in the city of Bonita Springs as well as nearly twice as many precincts as Collier, the elections office was finished by 9 p.m.

One of the differences is that each of Lee County's 171 precincts has a phone line over which to send the electronic data straight to the elections office.

Of Collier's 93 precincts, only 13 are so equipped. Workers at the other 80 precincts drive their data to the precincts without phone lines.

Edwards says her office is more concerned about accuracy than speed and there are no plans to change the process or install phone lines at the other voting places.

Collier elections officials could not estimate how much it would cost to install phone lines at each precinct, but Sharon Harrington, Lee County's supervisor of elections, said a phone line averages $100.

With Edwards focusing on accuracy, questions arise as to whether the inaccuracy of the Marco totals could have been caught earlier had the data been collected sooner.

Could phone lines at every precinct help?

"You bet it would," said Chuck Mohlke, chairman of the Collier County Democratic Party.

"We have a vast county that's bigger than the state of Delaware ... and an arterial east-west road system that is very crowded. We get shortchanged on each end."

Mohlke was not critical of the handling of Tuesday's elections.

But he was present Tuesday night when the Collier County Canvassing Board, which consists of Edwards, Collier County Commissioner Frank Halas, and Collier Judge Vince Murphy, was struggling during an open meeting with how to conduct a recount of the Marco race.

The top three vote-getters had won outright and two candidates had an 85-vote spread for the fourth seat, which triggered a recount by state law.

However, the voting machines are not set up by state law for a recount where there are four choices. After conferring with the state elections attorney, Edwards decided Wednesday to recount the entire Marco race.

But Mohlke says the issue needs to be addressed. The Marco City Council should decide whether to create its own canvassing board or add language to its charter that specifically deals with how such recounts should be handled.

"The public deserves to know what Marco and the supervisor of elections intends to do and not to have to wait until someone raises the issue in a public meeting and insists that they do something,'' Mohlke said. "It should be a matter of course. It would increase the level of confidence in everyone's mind."

Edwards ran into trouble during the 2002 general election, with officials rebooting computer tabulation machines after preliminary reports spit out wacky vote totals that were off by nearly 38,000 votes.

Mohlke acknowledged that elections will always be subject to human error.

He was not critical of Edwards.

"I thought we moved forward by having an opportunity to do a trial run before a presidential election,'' Mohlke said. "We learned a great deal. And (Edwards) will be evaluating carefully and making recommendation and changing administrative procedure to address some of the issues."