Dade election chief Kaplan resigns

Faced with questions over voting deficiencies, Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan suddenly resigned Thursday.

BY NOAKI SCHWARTZ AND TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE   Miami Herald   01 April 2005

Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan resigned Thursday amid increasing pressure from county officials who had grown frustrated with a succession of problems that included several hundred votes being lost in the most recent election.

County Manager George Burgess described the decision as mutual but acknowledged that he felt improvements could be made to the department. Kaplan, who could not be reached for comment, will be immediately replaced by her chief deputy, Lester Sola, pending County Commission approval.

This week Burgess launched an audit of the Elections Department and a review of six local elections after Kaplan reported that a faulty computer program did not count hundreds of votes in a March 8 referendum. Miami-Dade voters rejected the measure that would have allowed slot machines at local race tracks and jai-alai frontons. Broward County voters approved slots.

While Kaplan said the uncounted votes would not have changed the referendum's outcome in Miami-Dade, the parimutuel industry sent a letter to Burgess Thursday calling for a new election.

''We will pursue all remedies available under the law,'' said lobbyist Ron Book, who represents the parimutuels.

OTHER PROBLEMS

Burgess said the trouble with Kaplan wasn't confined to the March 8 election. That ''was part of a series of issues: differences on how we approach things,'' Burgess said. He said Kaplan had made some improvements to the department, pointing to the success of the high-stakes November presidential election.

Nonetheless, Kaplan's downfall was quick. A veteran Chicago elections official who had overseen voting in countries around the globe, Kaplan took the Miami-Dade job in June 2003 as the County Commission's choice to rescue the disaster-prone Miami-Dade elections process. Less than two years later, the one-time savior leaves with a tattered reputation.

County officials were desperate to shed the area's reputation for flubbing elections after the 1997 voter-fraud scandal and the 2000 presidential recount.

The county spent $24 million on new iVotronic voting machines, but in their first major test, the 2002 general election, poll workers fumbled with the machines, resulting in a countywide electoral meltdown.

Kaplan came in with 33 years on the Chicago board of elections, where she'd been the main elections troubleshooter. She also had successes and fond memories of consulting for elections in Kosovo, Zambia, Indonesia and China where she said she was mistaken for Madonna because she is blond.

Kaplan is still highly regarded in Chicago, said a former colleague who feared Miami politics contributed to his friend's swift fall from grace.

''They were fortunate to get someone of her talent,'' said Tom Leach, longtime spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which does not answer to a county manager or other politicians.

TROUBLE BEGINS

Kaplan beat out 120 other applicants for the $150,000-a-year job in Miami-Dade. But less than a year into her tenure, a flaw was discovered in the iVotronic machine's auditing system. County elections officials thought they had the glitch remedied, but instead they temporarily lost most of the data files from the 2002 elections.

By August 2004, then-County Commission Chair Barbara Carey-Shuler sent a memo to Burgess calling the county's elections Department ``the laughing stock of the nation.''

This February, county Inspector General Chris Mazzella issued a scathing report, accusing the department of poor oversight of campaign financing in the November election. Kaplan disagreed, saying there were ''many misstatements'' in the report.

The situation reached a boiling point this week when Kaplan alerted Burgess that a review showed unexpectedly high numbers of undervotes where ballots are cast but no choice is made in the March 8 referendum. The Elections Department found 1,246 electronic undervotes in comparison to 61 on absentee ballots.

Kaplan explained that about one-third of the electronic undervotes were caused by an election worker's miscoding a computer program.

The error affected cases in which voters made a ion but didn't push the red flashing ''vote'' button at the top of the machine. In such cases, poll workers are supposed to a cartridge that tells the machine to count the vote. But the bad coding instructed machines to ignore the votes.

Regarding the remaining two-thirds of the undercount, Kaplan said only that her staff found that some residents were confused by the ballot question and left without completing their vote.

She swiftly reassigned two supervisors in charge of the coding. Kaplan also blamed the Election Systems & Software, the company that makes iVotronic.

NOT RESPONSIBLE

The company responded in a statement: ``In this instance, the primary responsibility for this particular aspect of preparing for the election lies with the county.''

Burgess called her response ''inadequate'' and ''unacceptable.'' Mayor Carlos Alvarez agreed. ''To make excuses and assume a defensive posture doesn't solve anything,'' he said.

On Wednesday, Kaplan had a lengthy closed-door meeting in Burgess' office, followed by another on Thursday. The difference: At the second, she was followed in by the county's head of employee relations, there to finalize the details of Kaplan's departure.