Election vote loss examined

The state reacted to a revelation that records from a Dade primary may have been purged. Election-reform advocates said the incident destroyed the only way of verifying whether votes had been counted correctly by the touch-screen system.

BY JOE MOZINGO

Shortly after Miami-Dade's famously troubled 2002 gubernatorial primary, election-reform advocates looked at the precincts with the largest number of reported problems and discovered 1,544 missing ballots that is, 1,544 people who signed in at their polling places, but never recorded a vote on the county's new touch-screen machines.

Given the spate of glitches emerging from the machines this election year, Martha Mahoney, a University of Miami law professor, recently tried to go back and examine that early primary to see what went wrong.

''This is a huge unexplained gap,'' said Mahoney, a member of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. Janet Reno lost the Democratic primary to Bill McBride by just 4,794 votes, while the 1,544 missing votes were found in just 31 of the county's 754 precincts.

Unfortunately, the electronic records that could explain what went wrong and alert officials to a potential failure in upcoming elections were erased, cast into eternity by two computer crashes last year.

Auditors had repeatedly told the elections department to save the data in the so-called audit logs onto compact discs. But as far as election officials can tell, the advice was ignored.

''We're reaching out to people to make sure, in fact, it hadn't been saved somewhere,'' said Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the elections department.

A team of employees from the system's manufacturer, Election Systems & Software, worked with elections officials Wednesday to see if the information had simply been misplaced during major staff changes over the past two years.

Regardless, Kaplan said, the losses would not have jeopardized any potential recounts.

''Everything is preserved for at least 10 days after the election,'' he said.

But election-reform advocates say the problem is far more troubling.

Without the audit logs, there is no way of knowing whether the machines have been working properly and whether votes have been counted correctly or not.

''These audit logs are the closest thing we have to transparency when you can't see a ballot go into a box,'' said Mahoney.

``This is the only individual record of every ballot. And it's gone.''

Even before that 2002 primary, county auditors saw the importance of saving the audit logs to ensure the tabulation of votes is correct.

''We are primarily concerned about the Department's preparedness to conduct ballot recounts and ability to respond to possible challenge of election results,'' wrote Cathy Jackson, director of audit and management, in an Aug. 7 memo that year.

The memo advised the department to download the ballot image and audit logs from each machine and save them to a compact disc, ``similar to the retention of punched cards under the prior election system.''

This is not the first problem in preserving reliable records.

After a May 2003 election in Miami Beach, Orlando Suarez, division director of Miami-Dade County's technology department, found that the audit log mixed up the serial numbers of voting machines, making it difficult to figure out which machines were where.

In an October examination of a Homestead election, Suarez found that the event log failed to report 162 votes.

'I believe that there is/are a serious `bug' in the program(s) that generate these reports, making the reports unusable for the purpose that we were considering (audit an election, recount an election and, if necessary, use these reports to certify an election),'' Suarez wrote in a memo to Kaplan on June 6, 2003.

Both problems have caused friction between Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan and Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood.

On May 13, Hood sent a scathing letter to Kaplan for never notifying state officials about the problems Suarez discovered.

On Wednesday, Hood learned of the lost data from news reports.

''We are extremely concerned,'' said Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Hood. ``This had not been brought to our attention.''

Hood sent a memo to supervisors of elections statewide, telling them they ``are responsible for ensuring maintenance, retention and access of Florida's election records.''

Florida statutes require that ''electronic records are backed up on a regular basis to safeguard against the loss of information due to equipment malfunction or human error,'' Hood wrote.

She also sent one state election official to visit Kaplan Wednesday and planned to send a team to help the county today.

According to her spokesman, Kaplan did not realize the server crashes caused such a significant loss of data until after July 1, when the reform coalition first requested the information on that troubled September primary.