Absentee ballot blunder result of clerical mistake, judge says

By Jane Musgrave

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Tom Mullings wasn't among the politicos who stormed the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office as Hurricane Frances threatened, demanding to know why absentee ballots were being recounted in secret.

But when the dust settled around the Aug. 31 election, the suburban Boca Raton resident was the only one to see defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

"He's not too happy about it," his wife, Cheryl, said Tuesday of the recount that cost her husband the chance to be Republican state committeeman for District 85.
Mullings lost by a mere two votes, but because only 346 votes were cast in that race, even the razor-thin margin didn't meet the half-percent threshold that triggers an automatic recount.

"It's like point 0.58 percent. Not quite close enough," said Cheryl Mullings, who won a three-way race to become Republican state committeewoman for the 2,200 Republicans west of Boca Raton.

The discrepancy in absentee ballots that so puzzled elections officials and sparked a stand-off between them and angry Democrats turned out to be the result of a simple clerical error, said Palm Beach County Court Judge Barry Cohen, who serves as chairman of the elections canvassing board.

Faced with a record number of absentee ballots, officials began tabulating the votes four days before the election. Each night, workers got the vote counts off each machine and then reset the optical scanners to zero, he said.

On one occasion, however, a machine wasn't reset. That meant that the votes were tabulated twice, leading to a 6,700-vote discrepancy between the number of ballots returned and the number counted.

When the absentee ballots were sent through the scanners a second time on Sept. 1, officials counted 31,138 votes — not the 37,839 that were originally tabulated.

The main drama involved Arthur Anderson's defeat of Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, who designed the infamous butterfly ballot that some Democrats say cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000. However, while Anderson's margin over LePore decreased from 5,533 votes to 4,051 it didn't change the outcome.

Anderson said Tuesday that he was confident of the results.

Still, he said, it underscores the need to equip the electronic voting machines with printers so there will be a paper record of votes that can be recounted.

The push for the paper trail is what drove absentee ballots to record numbers for a primary election.