Posted on 03/15/2002 3:50:28 AM PST by FlJoePa
Poll workers to be reprimanded for election's human goofs
By Eliot Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 14, 2002
Blaming glitches in Tuesday's election not on Palm Beach County's new $14.4 million touch-screen system but on human error, Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said Wednesday she will reprimand 14 poll workers and no longer use the services of a 15th.
All failed to turn in all of their voting machines' electronic memory cards and had to go back to their precincts for them, causing delays in the counting of votes. The 15th, Boca Raton precinct clerk Joseph Greenwald, eventually took three memory cards home, requiring the city clerk to pick them up and delaying the release of Boca Raton's results until after midnight, city officials said.
The computer that tallies votes needed to account for memory cards from every machine in every precinct before it could count that precinct's votes -- even if, as LePore claims, the cards did not have any votes on them because they were from machines that were not used.
Noting that the rest of the 200 precincts reported without incident, LePore said, "Fifteen out of 200 is not good, but it's not bad."
Saying the touch-screen system is "something new and the first time out," LePore said each of the 800 poll workers trained for Tuesday's election received a two-hour orientation, a three-hour training workshop and a manual. She said she hopes Tuesday's problems will prod poll workers in time for September's countywide primary election, which will encompass 700 precincts and use about 5,000 workers.
County Commissioner Burt Aaronson was more critical.
"The supervisor has got to make sure that the system the county paid $14 million for works," Aaronson said. "There was a glitch. It is the supervisor's obligation to correct it. This can never happen again.
"That should have been one of the first things the supervisor should have considered... a problem that somebody didn't, so to speak, collect all the nickels and dimes. Whose responsibility is that? It falls solely on the supervisor."
LePore said some precinct workers, anticipating a low turnout, had opted not to activate all machines. But LePore said workers had been clearly told, both in the manual and in training, that they must turn in all the cards from machines, even those containing no votes. In fact, she said, her office called most of the precincts Tuesday afternoon to tell them to turn on all machines, so as to guarantee all cards would have to be turned in.
While a card can be destroyed or rendered useless, the information it carries can't be read or altered without the right software, LePore said. All the cards were eventually read, and showed no votes, as they should have, she said. But while they were being chased down, voters and candidates in several cities waited through television news breaks and the 10 o'clock news without even a partial tally from a small election that ended at 7 p.m.
Before Tuesday night, LePore had not considered the possibility of having to release partial tallies. With only 12 towns holding elections, some of them small, "I'm thinking we're going to be done by 9:30," she said. By the time she learned of the misplaced cards, she said, it would have been impractical to run a partial total since the missing precincts were on their way.
LePore had also said before Tuesday's election that she would not release partial counts on the county government's Channel 20 or on the elections office's Web page. She said their programming wasn't compatible with the new machines and getting the right programming had been low on her list for this election. But on election day, as the results finally spit out, the office faxed tally sheets to Channel 20 to be manually typed up for graphics scrolls, LePore said.
In the Boca Raton mix-up, Greenwald had retrieved three cards from the polling place but said when he got to the collection point, the Boca Raton Community Center, it was dark and locked, LePore said. She said he said he found the adjacent city hall also locked up, but he did not walk across the street to the police department or call any of the emergency phone numbers given to all poll workers. Instead, he went home.
Boca Raton spokeswoman Constance Scott said Greenwald didn't call the emergency numbers because he had left them in the community center earlier in the evening when he had delivered the used machines there.
"We were looking all over the place for the cartridges," LePore said. When two city clerks finally tracked down the man at home, she said, "he wasn't real happy."
Greenwald, who is paid $150 for working election day, could not be reached for comment.
Late Wednesday, elections officials inspected the three machines from Precinct 219B at First Baptist Church on Yamato Road that held the cards Greenwald had taken home. The machines had unbroken seals, which LePore said meant they had never been opened for voting. So she decided not to take the machines apart to check their internal memories to confirm that no votes had been cast.
LePore said Greenwald would not be invited back. She said the poll workers who showed up without all their discs but successfully retrieved them will receive "a stern letter" reminding them of procedure and will be given a last chance in the September county election.
Two types of complaints about the machine's technology were reported. LePore said she heard -- but received no formal complaints -- that some people touched one candidate's circle on the screen, only to see an X appear by another candidate's name. She said that's probably because the voters touched a wrong part of the screen with an errant fingertip or fingernail.
Other machines sometimes froze up when voters selected the language, English or Spanish, that they wanted to use. Phil Foster, regional manager for Oakland, Calif., based Sequoia Voting Systems, which sold Palm Beach County 3,900 touch-screen machines, said that was a software glitch and would be corrected in time for the September election. LePore said no one was unable to vote.
Staff writers Joel Engelhardt and Clay Lambert contributed to this story.
Now, the loser (by 2-1) of a county commission seat is now going to sue the county. Our local tax dollars at work.
It will just take a little time to learn how to "USE" the system ....
You mean to learn how to "abuse" the system
Yes, but can they be erased? Could republicans be sent to booths containing cards they will later run a degausser across?
There was nothing wrong with the old butterfly ballots or the voting machines in the 2000 election, it was the terminally stupid in PB and the gangster puppet masters on Gore's payroll. I have voted on that ballot and it really was very clear and easy, but then I do not vote in BP.
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