Smooth vote earns thumbs up

BY JOE MOZINGO Miami Herald 31 August 2004

Polls opened on time, lines were short and voters lodged few complaints as South Florida's voting machinery the pariah of the 2000 Presidential election and the subject of intense criticism and scrutiny in recent months faced its final test Tuesday before the big day in November.

By 7 p.m., votes had not been collected yet from the electronic voting equipment, but all indications were that the process went smoothly, with only a scattering of complaints, mainly about pollworker error.

Even the systems' most strident critics gave the primary election a tentative nod of approval. ''It's the honeymoon period,'' said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami Dade Election Reform Coalition.

While South Florida has conducted numerous successful elections on the electronic voting equipment since it was purchased in 2002, this year's Presidential election attracted an unprecedented beam of focus to the new machines and South Florida's ability to use them correctly.

The increased attention smoked out technological problems and prompted officials to take last minute measures to help ensure votes are counted accurately in the absence of a paper trail.

After all the scrambling, though, voter turnout appeared light across South Florida on Tuesday.

''The biggest problem? No voters,'' said Palm Beach County Election Supervisor Theresa LePore, during a stop at the Lantana Recreation Center, where poll workers outnumbered voters.

Whether a lack of confidence in the machines turned people away from the polls or prompted them to vote absentee is unclear. Voter turnout numbers, including early voting, were not yet available Tuesday evening.

But the biggest fear that the county would re-live the disastrous 2002 gubernatorial primary clearly did not come to pass.

In that election, long boot-up times and poor pollworker training set off a chain of events that left some precincts closed for hours and disenfranchised untold numbers of voters.

On Tuesday, the complaints were routine. County Manager George Burgess called the few problems ''so minor and so isolated'' that they were hardly worth discussing. The few that had cropped had mostly been human error, he said, and quickly resolved.

The most common gripe: voters were given the wrong party ballot and were unable to vote in their party's primary a frequent complaint in 2002.

''I was given a non-partisan ballot,'' said Blas Lopez, a registered Democrat in South Miami voting at the 1st United Methodist Church on Red Road. ``I noticed alot of names were missing.''

He cast his ballot anyway, he said, and then alerted pollworkers of the problem. But it was too late. They told him they could not cancel his ballot and let him vote again.

Voters are urged to watch the pollworker pick the correct party on the touch-screen machine before they start to vote. And if there's any doubt before you go to the polls, double check your party affiliation.

Lester Sola, Miami-Dade's chief deputy elections supervisor, said workers traced the few cases of confusion back to voters who had only recently switched parties too late to be reflected in records at the precincts.

By 5 p.m., of the 10,278 calls to the call center at election headquarters in Doral, 4,458 were related to registration questions. In most cases voters either didn't have their cards or didn't know their party affiliation.

Only 552 calls concerned the machines.

And the only report of a South Florida polling place having problems opening on time had nothing to do with technology. At the Southwest Christian Academy in Fort Lauderdale, a sheriff's deputy had to break a door to allow poll workers inside.

The poll clerk apparently had no key, said Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes, adding that since the voting machines were already set up, it took just a few minutes for a technician to prepare them for voting.

At the Broward County call center, the main question was where to send voters who showed up at the wrong precinct, largely due to the 2002 redistricting.

''Voters are just coming to the wrong place,'' said Evelyn Schikowski, a call center operator.

Statewide, officials said they had only heard of ''minor glitches'' in Tuesday's, citing the locked polling place in Broward County and a power loss at a precinct in Polk County.

''Everything is going pretty smoothly,'' said Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who spent the morning at an Orlando precinct and then visited Charlotte County before returning to Tallahassee.

Hood said that the state-run voter hotline had gotten only a handful of calls, mostly from people who were having trouble finding the right precinct.

'Our operators are really bored,' said Hood.

All in all, voters seemed at ease with the touch-screen machines.

''The machines were very modern,'' said Pedro Segarra, 22, who uses a wheelchair, at polls at the Orange Bowl. ``I felt very comfortable.''

''We love the new machines,'' said Marlén Valdés, a nursing assistant and South Miami resident voting at Palmetto Presbyterian Church. ``They're very easy to use.''

Commission Chair Barbara Carey-Shuler, who visted seven polling places that experienced troubles in past elections, said the only thing ''shocking'' about the primary vote was how smoothly things were running.

At Liberty City's Thena Crowder Elementary School, where the precinct suffered a virtual meltdown two years ago, Carey-Shuler and Burgess proudly watched precinct workers at Crowder boot up the touch screen machines at 6:18 a.m.

''At the end of the day we can tell the world that we're the best when it comes to running elections,'' Carey-Shuler said.

C.M. Williams, a voter there, found the proceedings vastly improved from ''the ruckus'' of 2002, when machines sputtered to a start, then crashed until at least mid-afternoon.

Observers across the region noted few problems but problems nonetheless.

Barbara Arnwine was one of dozens of out-of-state attorneys and activists in South Florida to monitor precincts and staff telephone hotlines.

She said dozens of voters had complaints ranging from lack of bilingual assistance for Spanish speakers to poorly marked signs at some precincts.

In Jacksonville, the national elections-watchdog organization, Election Protection fielded a couple of complaints that police were stopping motorists near precinct 7X, the Joint-Heirs Christian Center, which serves a predominantly black community. But no voters were apparently prevented from voting.

By nightfall, election officials still had to extract and cross-check results.

In Miami Dade, they planned to conduct an audit of the results in upcoming days to make sure the tabulation software counted the votes exactly as they were recorded on each touch-sreen machine. The audits have uncovered bugs in the past. Said Burgess: ``I am a firm believer that it's not over until it's over.''