Office Finds Disk Holding Voting Data From 2002
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, July 30 - Days after declaring the electronic records from the 2002 primary election here lost, the Miami-Dade County elections supervisor said Friday that her secretary had unearthed a disk containing the missing data.

Constance Kaplan, the supervisor, said the secretary found the disk in a file folder Friday morning, after elections officials had scoured desks, drawers, shelves and closets for two days and nights. Ms. Kaplan said a copy of the records was also found on a computer hard drive in the office's tabulation room.

"This was an internal-office, human-error problem," Ms. Kaplan told members of the Miami-Dade County Commission at an afternoon meeting.

Gov. Jeb Bush's administration had dispatched a team from Tallahassee, the state capital, to help search for the data, which elections officials said disappeared after two computer crashes last year. Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, said Friday that while the discovery was good news, the county should have had a reliable backup system in place all along.

Under state law, electronic voting records must be kept for a year for local and state elections, and 22 months for federal elections.

"Every supervisor of elections has this responsibility," Ms. Faraj said. "You have to set up a system to back up this information or to archive it and protect it."

Though county auditors had recommended as early as August 2002 that electronic voting records be backed up on CD's or elsewhere, Ms. Kaplan's office said as recently as Tuesday that it had not done so after the September 2002 primary for governor, the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Florida.

Her office said earlier this month that the records had been lost, after a citizens group requested all audit data from the 2002 primary. The group was hoping the audit trail might shed light on complaints of unrecorded votes in primarily black precincts.

The county commission had summoned Ms. Kaplan for an after newspapers reported this week that the data had been lost.

"We did have staff looking everywhere," she said of the search for the data, which began on Wednesday. "We've been at the warehouse searching through boxes; we've been searching through other records that we have, but we now know that we do have all the data that we thought had been lost."

Ms. Kaplan said that the loss of the data did not affect the tabulation of results in the race between Bill McBride and Janet Reno, the two Democratic candidates for governor in the 2002 primary. The electronic voting records on touch-screen machines are a back-up measure listing everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast.

The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. But the state recently prohibited the use of this data for recounts, saying that touch-screen machines do not allow for human error.

Ms. Kaplan said one computer crash occurred when office employees rearranged the tabulation room without properly powering down the computer network first. Since then, she said, the office has begun backing up data daily on external tapes.

The reappearance of the records seemed to provide little comfort to the county commissioners.

One commissioner, Betty Ferguson, asked why the elections office publicly acknowledged problems only after citizens groups or reporters discovered them. The Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, the same group that uncovered the loss of the 2002 records, also discovered through a public-records request this spring that the audit log functions in Miami-Dade's touch-screen machines were flawed.

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the election reform coalition, questioned why the office had not used the audit data to investigate complaints of lost votes in 2002. A study by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, appeared to have been lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County.

"It's like a little child lost in the woods, and nobody calls the police, and you wonder why that child isn't being looked for," Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff said. "Not only have we not looked at our audit data, we can't even find it. And then we locate it in a conference room after they've been asked for it for a month."