Minor Voting Problems Reported In Central Florida (Machine Broken 3 Counties HandCount)

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A few problems cropped up in Central Florida Tuesday but voters said they were minor compared to the past two statewide elections, according to Local 6 News.

Computer problems briefly knocked out ballot scanners at three Central Florida precincts: one each in Brevard, Orange and Seminole counties.

Local 6 News reported that the scanners were not working at the Gotha Precinct 101 in Orange County, Fla.

Voters were putting their ballots in a box to be hand-counted until the machines were repaired, according to the report.

In Winter Park, precinct doors remained closed at a recreation center until 7:20 a.m. Once they opened, voters said they had trouble feeding the optical scan ballots through machines, and English-speaking voters said they were handed Spanish-language ballots.

The scanners also were not working at Port St. John Precinct 159 in Brevard County or Precinct 116 in Seminole County at the St. Albins Church on state Road 426, according to reports.

Elsewhere, touch-screen machines, which replaced punch-card machines in 15 counties, were misprogrammed at a South Miami precinct, but Miami-Dade County Manager Steve Shiver said no one was turned away.

"You're never going to have a flawless opening,'' he said. "The backup system worked.''

Former Attorney General Janet Reno, who lost the Democratic primary for governor, waited with 40 others to vote in suburban Miami and quickly moved through the line, in contrast to being turned away Sept. 10 when machines weren't ready.

"It was smooth," said Reno, who campaigned in recent weeks for Democratic candidate Bill McBride in his bid to unseat Gov. Jeb Bush. "They were prepared for me this time."

An official said only two Broward precincts opened late and all were running by 7:03 a.m. Voters said a precinct at a performing arts center in Hollywood opened five minutes late, but poll worker Bob Brown denied it.

A 144-line phone center set up to handle emergency calls from Broward poll workers was jammed in the first hour of voting.

Paralegal Lori Nathan, who didn't vote in September, got a run-around trying to vote in the Broward suburb of Davie. Her voter card listed a middle school as her precinct, but there was no voting there. A lawn worker sent her and others to a community college, which had no polls. She eventually found out she was assigned to vote at Town Hall.

"I think it prevents people from voting,'' she said. "I'm annoyed but I'm here and I'm voting. It's a good thing I didn't have my kids today or I'd be mad.''

In the Broward suburb of Miramar, about 150 people lined up at opening time at a residential clubhouse hosting two precincts, but the crowd cleared quickly.

Johnalee Richardson, a receptionist in the central Florida community of Sanford, said: "There was lots of stuff on the ballot. That was the hardest.''

Two years ago, disputed recounts in Florida held up the presidential election of George W. Bush for five weeks. Problems with new touchscreen machines in September delayed the McBride-Reno results for a week.

In the time since, Miami-Dade and Broward election officials hastily worked to increase poll worker training and add hundreds of workers to troubleshoot the new machines. The two counties account for nearly 2 million of 9.3 million registered voters statewide.

Based on past mistakes, election monitors filtered across the state from the Justice Department and independent groups, including the Washington-based Center for Democracy, which normally observes Third-World voting.

(VOTER NEWS SERVICE STILL DOESN'T WORK!)
(And these are the guys counting our votes nationwide???)

Voter News Service Tests Poll Info.

Mon Nov 4, 9:20 PM ET

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - Hours before Election Day, Voter News Service said Monday it still hadn't worked all the bugs out of a new system designed to provide media organizations with exit polling information from voters.

As a precaution, NBC and CBS last weekend began conducting their own joint poll of voter attitudes about the midterm election.

VNS, a consortium consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and The Associated Press, counts actual votes and also conducts exit polling in certain precincts. That information is used by its members to project winners in individual races on Election Night.

The consortium completely rebuilt its system in response to the 2000 election, when television networks twice used its information to make wrong calls in the decisive Florida vote for the presidential election.

VNS has expressed confidence in its ability to tabulate the votes on Tuesday, though its vote counting process had never been tested in its entirety. VNS members have access to a second, independently conducted vote count by the AP.

VNS also plans to use exit polling of how citizens voted, together with the actual vote count, to help project winners and losers.

Where the system has run into trouble is its attempt to tabulate the results of questions that reflect why voters cast their ballots as they did. VNS has yet to complete a full test of a national voter survey, said Ted Savaglio, VNS executive director.

The consortium will continue to test the system into Election Day, he said.

That information is considered vital to fleshing out the reasons behind the electorate's vote, and is of particular importance to the 19 newspapers that have contracted with the consortium for that information.

The nervousness of some media members about the system was reflected in the new CBS and NBC poll, which gathered voter attitudes about issues Saturday through Monday.

"We remain hopeful that VNS will provide the national poll," said NBC News spokeswoman Barbara Levin. "However, as a precaution, NBC News has been doing our own national polling and we are prepared to use that information."

CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius described the new poll as a backup. CBS has considered all along that the rebuilding of VNS would be a four-year process and that the system won't be as complete this election.

"The parts that we are confident in, we'll use," she said. "The parts that we are not confident in, we will not use."

ABC News also said it was prepared to go on Election Night without VNS exit polling information. "Any information about which we have any doubt will simply be set aside," spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.

(All the signs were there ahead of time... )

(And this is just one example.)

Voters fear ballot glitch in Pompano

By Lisa J. Huriash
Staff Writer
Posted October 26 2002

When Milton Fein, a critic of Pompano Beach city government, opened the sample election ballot mailed to his home this week, he thumbed through pages of state races and county charter amendments. But the city's controversial mayor-at-large referendum wasn't on the ballot, leading Fein to think another election snafu had occurred.

"I was perturbed; I thought political people had the issue intentionally removed," he said.

But individual city referendum questions aren't on the sample ballots. That's because it would have been too costly and difficult to include them, said Joe Cotter, Broward's deputy election supervisor in charge of the Nov. 5 vote.

City questions never have been listed on sample ballots, he said.

Seven cities will vote on charter amendments on Election Day: Deerfield Beach, Weston, Pembroke Pines, Margate, Cooper City, Hallandale Beach and Pompano Beach.

They range from eliminating term limits in Cooper City to changing the length of City Commission terms in Margate.

"Our sample ballots don't include municipal or district issues," Cotter said. "If you look on the first page of our sample ballot, it specifically says this ballot does not include special district or municipal issues. It would have been just too complicated for the number of ballot styles."

Responds Pompano Beach activist M. Ross Shulmister, who forced the mayor-at-large referendum issue onto the ballot: "Too bad. We have no beef with the Supervisor of Elections Office on this issue. But it would be nice if people knew."

The mayor-at-large issue is contentious, which led some people to consider conspiracy theories when they didn't see it on the sample ballot. Voters will decide if they will elect their mayor rather than letting city commissioners name a mayor from their ranks.

A group of black residents unsuccessfully filed for an emergency injunction earlier this month, saying if the choice of mayor was left to the will of the public, a black person wouldn't get the position.

Janice Griffin, an attorney and city activist who is considering running for mayor if the change is approved, said two residents had called her, worried when they didn't see the item on the sample ballot.

"It would have been nice for people to have exactly what they're going to looking at," she said.

"On the other hand you can certainly understand the logistical problems that the supervisor of elections would have trying to generate 30 different versions of the sample ballot. It creates just one more item of confusion for people at the polls who haven't been made aware of it."

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4557

14:53 EST Tuesday

Duval County precincts report minor problems

Paul Ivice American City Business Journals

Through midday, few problems have been reported at Duval County polling places.

There were scattered reports of optical scanning machines failing, but technicians with the Supervisor of Elections Office quickly responded to repair or replace those vote-counting machines, said Mike Tolbert, a spokesman for the Supervisor of Elections Office.

At the Mary Singleton Senior Citizens Center in Springfield, where poll workers were unable for two hours to get their machine working on primary election day in September, there again was a delay.

"Everything was set up properly but the machine itself would not scan ballots; I had to request another," said A. Wellington Barlow, a Jacksonville attorney who was serving as precinct clerk. This was one of 25 precincts that Supervisor of Elections John Stafford had identified as a problem in September and replaced all or most of the poll workers.

Barlow said 25 to 35 people completed their ballots before the voting machine was replaced at 8:10 a.m.

Sign up to receive free daily business updates by email every weekday afternoon.

Use Search Watch to watch for related topics, companies.

Receive free Industry News via email. Choose from 46 different industries.

Those voters were invited back to watch their ballot get fed into the machine at 7 p.m. Barlow said it remained a potential problem because if the machine still rejected a ballot, the voter could not be given another one.

"I think a lot of people called first" to make sure the polling place was open, Barlow said.

Other problems with voting machines were attributed to voters using the wrong kind of marker on the ballots. It appeared that in some cases at the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on the Northside, the marker's ink would bleed through the paper ballot, causing the optical scanner to reject it.

Miki Ahmed-Jefferson, another first-time precinct clerk, said those voters were given another ballot.

Mike Tolbert, a spokesman for the Supervisor of Elections Office, said five out of 285 vote-counting machines had malfunctioned and were replaced. Otherwise, "everything seems to be going smoothly," he said.

Turnout appeared light early in the day. Ahmed-Jefferson estimated turnout at her Northside precinct at 20 percent by noon. At 11 a.m., another Northside precinct had seen fewer than 75 of its 968 registered voters.

Though not being scrutinized as closely as the voting in Dade County, Duval County's polling places were being watched by Justice Department attorneys and election watchers from the People for the American Way Foundation.

Andrew Gillum, field coordinator for the foundation, said this election was going much more smoothly than the primary. Jorge Martinez, a spokesman in Washington for the Justice Department, said shortly before noon than no problems had been reported to him from Duval County.

http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/stories/2002/11/04/daily19.html

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.