Dade official seeking monitor for vote

The Miami-Dade Commission's chairwoman asked for independent oversight of the upcoming county and federal elections.

BY CHARLES RABIN in the Miami Herald   10 August 2004

Miami-Dade Commission Chairwoman Barbara Carey-Shuler has asked the county manager to let an independent organization monitor the county's primary election in three weeks and the presidential election in November.

Last week, Carey-Shuler issued a memo to County Manager George Burgess urging election revisions that included the testing of the electronic voting machines during the election and oversight from the inspector general's office and the county's Audit and Management Department.

She said the county and its Elections Department were ``the laughingstock of the nation.''

On Monday, Carey-Shuler wanted Burgess to contact the International Foundation for Elections Systems, a company created after it merged with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy which oversaw the county's election process in November 2002.

''Today, we are again at a crossroads,'' Carey-Shuler wrote. ``Florida, specifically Miami-Dade County, is once more under the nation's and the world's watchful eyes.''

She gave Burgess until Monday to reply.

The county manager, after returning to Miami for a day last week to reassure the public that the voting process would proceed smoothly, went on vacation to Maine with his family.

Carey-Shuler also was out of town.

Assistant County Manager Susanne Torriente said her office welcomes any suggestions on how to get people to believe that every vote will count.

''We'll gladly look at how they offer services that differ from the Office of Inspector General and Audit and Management Department,'' she said.

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, who chairs Miami-Dade's Election Reform Coalition, welcomed Carey-Shuler's latest plea.

She said it was her group that was instrumental in getting the Center for Democracy to the county two years ago.

''We absolutely are in favor of having outside observers,'' Rodriguez-Taseff said. ``But their effectiveness depends on how much access they're given and how much time they're here before an election.''

MISSING VOTES

The recent flap began two weeks ago when county Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan told a group of stunned commissioners that her office had the ability to investigate 1,544 missing votes from a 2002 election, but didn't because it was not required to do so.

The votes were eventually found on a disc in a closet in the Elections Department.

That led to Carey-Shuler's memo about revisions and a subsequent memo from Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas asking the county to do a feasibility study on using optical scanning machines which would leave a paper trail, a critical concern of some voters for the November election.

At the same time, activists gathered at County Hall in support of the county chairwoman's request, some of them demanding that Burgess return from his vacation. He did, then returned to Maine. He is expected back today.

The Elections Department has been under the gun since it spent $24 million on Electronic Systems & Software's iVotronic voting machines not long after the disputed 2000 presidential election.

GLITCHES AND FLAWS

The machines' first major test came in the September 2002 primary, when mechanical glitches and lack of poll worker training created serious problems. County police were called in to help run the general election in November of that year.

In May, a flaw was discovered in the machine's audit system. The state certified new ES&S software to fix the problem last month. But three weeks later, Miami-Dade election officials said they had lost most of the data files from the 2002 elections in two 2003 computer crashes.

With similar problems popping up around the state, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson continued to ask state election officials for an independent audit. The Melbourne Democrat last month called for an audit of voting systems in the wake of reports questioning touch-screen machines, but Secretary of State Glenda Hood refused his request.