County commissioner calls for inquiry into ‘mishaps and irregularities in vote tabulation’,
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, July 3, 2008, by Josh Hafenbrack

WEST PALM BEACH - Palm Beach County should launch an inquiry into ways to avoid the "mishaps and irregularities in vote tabulation" that have plagued elections in recent years, County Commissioner Jeff Koons said Thursday.

On the same day Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson apologized for the miscount in last week's West Palm Beach city election and blamed the problem on the county's new Sequoia-brand optical scan voting machines, Koons said it's time to ask Secretary of State Kurt Browning to offer recommendations on "remedying the ongoing problems with the Elections Office."

In addition, Koons said the county should see if it can change its contract with Sequoia Voting Systems to provide review and assistance in the voting-counting process.

The latest elections mishap came June 24, when 697 votes in a special city commission election - 14 percent of the total - weren't counted. After a computer audit indicated something went wrong, the elections office discovered the problem and released the full results two nights later. The ballots didn't change the outcome of the election, which returned Kimberly Mitchell to the commission.

"Once again, we apologize to the public for the complications that occurred," Anderson said at a news Thursday conference.

Anderson distributed a memo from a representative of Sequoia, Phil Foster, explaining an anti-tampering feature kept the results from three voting cartridges in a state of "suspension" because votes from more than one election were stored on those cartridges. The second set of results on the cartridges might have been from a test run, Anderson said.

In the future, the elections office will turn off this security feature and make sure all cartridges are cleared and re-formatted before each election, Anderson said.

He said the foul-up was a matter of timing, not the security of the ballots. "The votes themselves were never at risk," Anderson said, adding he was glad to learn to work out this kink before the fall elections.

Anderson's four-year tenure has been marred by a string of election-night missteps. In Florida's January presidential election, Anderson was hours behind most counties in posting results, a delay he blamed on a defective cartridge. In March 2007 city elections, Anderson posted incorrect results on his Web site, leading some losers to think they'd won their races until late in the night. He blamed that problem on a software glitch.

And in 2006, Anderson's office counted absentee ballots from Pahokee in a Mangonia Park race - changing the outcome of a race for Mangonia Park city council.

One of Anderson's opponents in his re-election bid this summer, state Rep. Susan Bucher, said Anderson is "passing the buck" by placing the blame on the equipment feature. She said someone in the elections office should have flagged the results when those precincts - typically some of the busiest in the city - reported unusually low turnout.

"The problem was a very simple administrative error," she said. "It's unfortunate that we have an administrator who's never learned his job."