Staff hid missing votes 13 days
An internal report says the Hillsborough elections supervisor wasn't told about the discrepancy until Sept. 16.
By JEFF TESTERMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published October 22, 2004

TAMPA - On Sept. 3, one day after the Hillsborough County Canvassing Board met and certified the results of the primary election, Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson's staff made a startling discovery.

Their records seemed to show that 245 voters had cast ballots the elections office couldn't find.

Those 245 votes were significant. They had the potential to change the outcome of at least one race: In the Republican primary for the District 47 seat in the Florida House of Representatives, Bill Bunkley had lost to Kevin Ambler by just 130 votes.

Yet Johnson's staff told no one outside the elections office about the 245 vote discrepancy, according to an internal report obtained by the St. Petersburg Times that details the investigation into the lost votes.

Hillsborough elections officials notified neither the county attorney's office, the canvassing board, the state division of elections nor any primary candidates that 245 votes were unaccounted for. In fact, while the investigation into the missing votes dragged on for 13 days, the elections staff did not even tell Johnson about it.

Johnson, who was appointed elections chief last year when Pam Iorio quit to run for Tampa mayor, was not told of the discrepancy until Sept. 16, according to the internal report.

By then, the 10-day period for a candidate to challenge the result of the election had expired. That statutory clock began ticking after the canvassing board certified the election results as official. The challenge period ran out Sept. 13, three days before Johnson was even made aware of the problem.

"That's awful," Hillsborough County Commissioner Pat Frank said when told about the handling of the missing votes. "It's malfeasance.

"The staff had an obligation to report this to Buddy and to (state) election officials. They should have realized it was a big deal and called a press conference as soon as they found it."

Frank has a particular sensitivity about factors that could sway tight elections. A Democrat now running for clerk of the circuit court, Frank lost a race for the school board in 1968 by just 54 votes. She said Johnson must ultimately be called to task for the handling of the 245 lost votes.

"It's really serious," Frank said. "And Buddy is responsible for what goes on."

Thursday, Johnson agreed he should have known about the problem. A three-term GOP legislator who is himself up for election against Democrat and computer programmer Rob MacKenna, Johnson said he had "a most unpleasant conversation" with his staff when he was finally told of the vote discrepancy.

"Do I wish my staff would have made me aware? In hindsight, yes," Johnson, 52, told the Times. "If I had known earlier, I would have acted sooner. ... I'm not clairvoyant."

Ultimately, elections officials determined that 245 votes cast at an early voting site at the West Gate Regional Library had never been tabulated in the final primary results because a worker left the touch screen voting machine in "test" mode.

Once the elections staff extracted those 245 ballots from the machine and tallied them, they concluded that the votes would not have altered the outcome of any primary race.

Johnson had been told nothing about the investigation into the missing votes until after it was concluded, according to the internal report.

Johnson's chief of staff, Dan Nolan, oversaw the investigation.

Nolan, 50, is a former Army colonel with U.S. Central Command who joined the elections staff shortly after Johnson was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush. He said Thursday that initially he was convinced that the 245-vote discrepancy was an administrative paperwork error that would be quickly resolved. In retrospect, he should have treated the problem with "a greater sense of urgency" and informed Johnson and others about it, Nolan said.

"I screwed this up," said Nolan, who signed on with Johnson for a limited tour of duty and expects to leave some time after the general election. "The responsibility is mine. There is no excuse."

According to his internal report, Nolan began his inquiry Sept. 3 when absentee manager Sharon Smith notified him that the office showed 26,935 certificates signed by early and absentee voters, but just 26,690 early and absentee votes cast - a difference of 245.

Nolan made sure all votes from touch screen cartridges had been tabulated. He directed an inventory of all absentee ballots. He briefly considered whether software might have credited more people voting than there were ballots.

Finally, he ordered a hand count of ballots using paper audit trails from each early voting machine. That led to the identification of the missing 245 votes from one specific machine.

Johnson first learned of the situation from Nolan on Sept. 16. That same day, Johnson composed and forwarded a letter to Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees the state's Division of Elections.

Johnson wrote that the 245 votes were lost because of "human error by a veteran election staffer in setup and implementation" of an early voting machine. He also said it did not appear the votes could be counted in Hillsborough's final election results because they had been found after certification.

He was right. For purposes of official results, the votes made by 245 voters who went to the West Gate Library were wiped out.

Johnson waited 24 hours before notifying the media. In an e-mail to news outlets at about 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 17, Johnson said he was "extremely disappointed that this error has occurred." He emphasized that the lost votes did not change the outcome of any election and promised additional management safeguards.

Johnson provided no background about when his staff had begun looking into the discrepancy, and made no mention of being kept in the dark himself for 13 days while his staff hunted down the missing votes.

Three weeks after notifying the state of the lost votes, the County Commission called Johnson to account for the oversight that excluded the votes of 245 residents. Commissioner Kathy Castor, whose district includes the West Gate Library early voting site, asked Johnson to appear and provide assurances the episode would never be repeated.

Johnson gave those assurances and boasted of his office's handling of the problem.

"I'm proud of my staff," he told the commission on Oct. 6, according to a transcript. "I'm proud of myself in the immediate release of the information, and we did release all of this information immediately.

"This happened a month ago, and we have not withheld, we have not done anything to disguise this, this issue in the least. I'm very proud of that transparency."

Told Thursday of the office's internal report, Castor said, "That's different from the statements (Johnson) made at the County Commission."

Castor said it helped explain "the overwhelming resistance" she encountered in getting Johnson to provide a full accounting of the lost votes to commissioners.

"He sure did not want to appear before us," she said. "He practically begged not to come."

Johnson said Thursday he did not divulge the details of the internal report to the commission because "I didn't want to throw any of the staff under the bus.

"I take responsibility for the error. We've fixed it. Now, I've told my staff to put their hands back on the plow and have a flawless presidential election."

In his internal report, Nolan noted that Hurricane Charley forced the elections office on Aug. 13 to use "a reduced, but very experienced crew" to continue testing of the touch screen machines to be used for early voting in the primary.

A day later, a staffer mistakenly left a voting machine in the "test" mode and sent it to the West Gate Library. Staffers there never noticed. "Experienced people, working in a time constrained environment, contributed to this human error," Nolan concluded in his report. "I do not believe that gross negligence was involved."

"If any blame devolves," Nolan added, "it is upon me for not pursuing the investigation with the sense of urgency it deserved."

Bunkley, who lost by 130 votes in the closest race in the primary, said he wished he had been told about the vote discrepancy when elections officials learned of it, even though a subsequent tally of the missing votes showed the outcome would not have changed.

"I had many, many questions about our race," he said. "This adds to the puzzlement."