245 Votes In Primary Originally Uncounted
By TED BYRD Tampa Tribune

Published: Sep 18, 2004

TAMPA - Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson has maintained that vote-counting delays during the Aug. 31 primary were unfortunate but that results were accurate.

Not quite. It turns out 245 votes weren't counted from one of three touch-screen machines set up for early voting at Westgate Regional Library.

Johnson announced the problem Friday, saying the votes have been tallied at this point and no campaign outcomes were altered. The state has recertified the results.

``We're very disappointed this happened,'' he said. ``That's the bottom line.''

The oversight was blamed on human error. The machine was left in ``test'' mode, so votes were recorded and stored but not counted initially, Johnson said.

With his own name on the ballot Nov. 2, as he seeks election to an office he gained through appointment by Gov. Jeb Bush, Johnson expressed confidence in the process. He and his staff still believe in Hillsborough's $13 million Sequoia machinery, he said.

The latest bumps in the road, however, on top of persistent debate about the fallibility of electronic technology, have some people worried.

Add to those concerns the lingering stigma of Florida's 2000 presidential election, the fiasco this year over the state's faulty ``felon voter'' list, the high-profile fight this week about whether Ralph Nader should be on the ballot - and skeptics say it's no surprise lawyers are moving to the state to monitor Election Day.

``It's no wonder people's faith is shaken,'' Hillsborough Commissioner Pat Frank said.

Carolyn Vallone, a Town 'N Country resident who voted early at Westgate library, said she had no problems with the system, but she's upset her vote may have been among those almost lost.

``I didn't worry until now,'' she said. ``They bragged so much about how well-trained everyone was, and how we had the new machines.''

Marilyn Hood, who also voted early at the library, said she wasn't as concerned.

``It has been recovered, and it didn't affect the outcome,'' she said. ``Accidents do happen.''

The sharpest criticism of the Republican Johnson came from the Democrat seeking his job, Rob MacKenna, who noted the found votes were announced 17 days after the primary.

``Buddy's excuse was he'd rather have it accurately rather than quickly. Well, we didn't get either,'' MacKenna said. ``In the real world, this is stuff you get fired over.''

Details Of What Happened

Johnson said the votes were found as his staff did a final analysis of results. They compared the number of people who signed in to vote at each precinct against the number of votes cast there.

Early voting began Aug. 16, and on the three machines at Westgate, a total of 1,050 votes were recorded even though about 1,300 people had signed in during the two weeks.

The match between sign-ins and ballots cast is rarely 100 percent. Some people bail out without voting, and others don't complete the ballots. Those are called undervotes.

``It didn't make a lot of sense that there was that many undervotes,'' Johnson said of the library situation. So officials began looking for other explanations.

They found the answer Friday. On the machine mistakenly left in test mode, the votes were collected in a way that wouldn't be read later when the machine's data cartridge was fed into a tabulating computer.

The mistake was made by ``a veteran staff person,'' Johnson said without identifying the worker. ``Human error straight up.''

A 245-vote gap may not seem like much in a county where 118,699 votes were cast, but consider some of the close contests.

In the Republican primary for state House District 47, Kevin Ambler defeated Bill Bunkley by 130 votes. In a three-way contest for county judge, no one prevailed by collecting at least 50 percent of the vote, so Liz Rice advanced to the fall election along with Henry Gill, who edged Brad Souders by less than a half- percentage point.

Then there is the memory of Florida's 537-vote difference in the presidential race four years ago.

``What they lost was about half of what elected the president in 2000,'' said Reggie Mitchell, election protection director at People for the American Way Foundation, a coalition of organizations monitoring the situation in Florida.

Debate Over The Machines

Controversy over electronic voting centers on the type of records left behind.

With optical scan machines, as with the old punch-card system, voters have actual paper ballots that are marked and then read by a machine. The paper record is kept so it can be recounted manually if needed.

Hillsborough's equipment is more like a bank's automated teller machines. The approved ballot is electronic, and only the totals are kept.

In the Sequoia machines, a paper tally of vote totals is printed at the end of the day for each machine. Those summaries could be recounted. But the initial vote cannot be reconstructed or studied, critics say.

``There has to be some backup, and there is none,'' said Frank, who voted as a county commissioner against buying the Sequoia system. ``I don't care what they say. If it's defective the first time, it'll be defective the second time.''

Even if the machines perform perfectly, people often don't, said Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho in Tallahassee.

Sancho had that point driven home in 1986, when poll workers improperly prepared pull-lever machines. Thousands of people couldn't vote for candidates of their choice.

``Human beings are prone to error,'' he said. ``The problem is what we touch, we usually mess up.''

Others point out that Hillsborough used about 2,100 machines for the primary. With three times more voters expected for the general election, 3,500 machines are needed.

Annette DeLisle, president of the Hillsborough League of Women Voters, said she's reasonably confident in the system but realizes the problems will give more ammunition to critics.

``It's hard,'' she said. ``If you're skeptical, you're skeptical.''

Back To Primary Night

Hillsborough's primary problems emerged soon after counting began Aug. 31, and area candidates endured a long, jittery night. Results weren't totaled until after sunrise Sept. 1.

Johnson's office met the statutory requirements for getting results to the state, but it took until late Sept. 2 to determine that indexes in the computer server tabulating votes had failed. That required the computer to read through every record in the database as it tabulated results for individual races.

Johnson has compared that to trying to find one word in a textbook by flipping through every page instead of using an index as a guide.

He and others have assured the public that things are under control for Nov. 2.

Al Higginbotham, Hillsborough's Republican Party chairman, was at the Elections Service Center during primary night to watch the vote counting.

``Once it was an issue of processing versus an issue of accuracy, I felt comfortable with it,'' he said.

Higginbotham said he hears no concern among voters that the indexing problem undercut the integrity of the system.

``I haven't heard anybody bring it up,'' he said.