245 Hillsborough primary votes go uncounted
An elections worker leaves a touch screen machine in "test" mode at an early voting site. No races are affected.
By JEFF TESTERMAN, St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer
Published September 18, 2004

TAMPA - Nearly 250 votes cast at a Hillsborough County early voting site before the Aug. 31 primary were never counted, a mistake that was discovered Friday, 17 days after the election.

The votes went untabulated, said Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson, because a veteran elections worker mistakenly left a touch screen voting machine in the "test" mode, causing its votes to be recorded but preventing them from being added to the final election results.

Johnson said he immediately reported his finding of the 245 missing votes to the Florida Department of State on Friday afternoon, emphasizing that their discovery did not alter the outcome of any local election. He also said he had taken steps to prevent any recurrence of the tabulation mishap.

"I'm taking this very, very seriously," Johnson said. "I'm very disappointed it happened. I will take every measure to assure it doesn't happen again."

This is not the first problem with the primary election for Johnson, a restaurateur and former state legislator appointed to the elections job last year. After the polls closed Aug. 31, Johnson's computer servers mysteriously slowed to a snail's pace, and the vote was not totally counted until 5:10 a.m. the day after the election.

After a diagnosis by Sequoia Voting Systems, the vendor that sold Hillsborough its $12-million package of touch screen voting machines, Johnson announced that a computer indexing system had malfunctioned, causing the server to repeatedly search through its entire data base before recording any single vote.

A few days later, Johnson said he wasn't sure why the computer indexing hadn't worked properly but declared it "now fixed." He also assured an audience at the Tiger Bay Club that accuracy, not speed, had been paramount.

The revelation of the latest problem, however, provided ammunition for Rob MacKenna, an Eckerd Corp. computer programmer who won the Democratic primary for elections supervisor and now faces Johnson, a Republican, on Nov. 2 in the race for the $119,584-a-year job.

"After we had all the problems on election night, Buddy Johnson said accuracy was far more important than speed," MacKenna said Friday. "Apparently, we didn't get either.

"In the real world, this is the kind of thing people get fired for," MacKenna added. "When it comes time for the voters to evaluate Mr. Johnson's performance, this is one more thing they will have to consider."

In a statement released Friday night, MacKenna said Johnson should be held accountable for the error. "Of all the duties of the Supervisor of Elections, certifying an election without counting every vote is among the worst possible mistakes," he said.

Johnson said the 245 votes were cast at the West Gate Library early voting site during the two weeks before the primary. He said a "veteran elections service center staffer" accidentally left a voting machine in the "test" mode and no one caught the error. Johnson declined to identify the staffer responsible and said no disciplinary action had been meted out.

"It's too early to determine if that is necessary," he said. "We work together as a team here."

Johnson said he notified members of the county's Canvassing Board of the vote-counting problem, as well as the office of Secretary of State Glenda Hood and a handful of local candidates whose tallies rose after the 245 votes were discovered.

"Johnson informed the department that it was caused by human error but that it did not impact any race," said Alia Faraj, spokeswoman for Hood. "Secretary Hood is extremely concerned that it does not happen again."

The American Civil Liberties Union weighed in, saying the latest mishap at the Hillsborough elections office underlined the need for an independent audit of touch screen voting systems to prevent disenfranchisement of local voters.

"This episode with the lost votes highlights the need for independent audits, not only to determine if the machines are working properly, but also whether systems are in place to catch these kind of problems before they occur," said Rebecca Steele, director of the West Central Florida Regional Office of the ACLU.

Johnson said he had already ordered additional training of poll workers to identify whether voting machines are in the test mode, and had instructed managers to personally sign off on each machine's processing record before it is delivered to any polling site.

Johnson said that of the 245 new votes, 14 went to the candidates in the closely contested Republican primary for District 47 in the Florida House of Representatives. Kevin Ambler picked up nine votes, while Bill Bunkley got five, leaving Ambler with a 135-vote margin of victory.

In the Group 11 race for county judge, 130 of the newfound votes went to Liz Rice, 55 went to Henry Gill and 37 went to Brad Souders. That still left Rice with 48 percent of the vote, facing a runoff in November with Gill, with Souders 434 votes behind Gill and thus eliminated.

"I handled the calls to the candidates myself," said Johnson. "And they were all very understanding of what had happened."