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July 4, 2009 |
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| September 04, 2008 |
By: Bud Newman |
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he primary ballot mess in Palm Beach County got worse today.
The state of Florida refused to certify results in a tight race between Palm Beach Circuit Judge Richard Wennet and challenger William Abramson, and Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning was in West Palm Beach to help figure out what was going on.
County workers returned to their tabulation center and to again tally the total number of ballots cast in the Aug. 26 primary and produced a result no one wanted to hear: another new total.
Jeff Darter, the information technology manager for county elections, acknowledged at a late-afternoon meeting of the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board that ballots are still missing. He had no explanation for the new number.
"There is still the possibility that there are more ballots off premises,” Darter said.
After Darter offered the new total of 100,002, another county election official, Marion Salenback, said she found two more provisional ballots that were put in the wrong place and had not been counted.
Phil Foster, vice president of business development for voting machine maker Sequoia Business Systems, was stumped.
“I’ve never seen this exact thing occur,” he told the board.
His team arrived today, checked the equipment and concluded the machines were counting correctly.
“The reason we got into the voting machine business a long time ago is because people don’t do a good job of counting,” Foster said.
Poll workers were summoned to count all ballots to determine if 102,523 were cast in the primary as the initial returns indicated.
County officials announced earlier in the day that they had found about 2,700 ballots that were accidentally left out of last weekend’s machine recount in the judicial race. But that vote recovery may have been premature.
The count announced by Darter was the third tally.
With the numbers in question more than ever, the three-member county canvassing board voted unanimously to run all ballots on the premises through counting machines to determine how many people voted, but not to count votes in the unsettled race.
The county also will send workers to every precinct to look for other ballots, said Brad Merriman, deputy county administrator.
He said Browning called him during the meeting to say the state canvassing board would meet at 9:30 a.m. Friday in Tallahassee to certify the results of all Florida races except the Wennet-Abramson race.
“The urgency has been removed,” Merriman said.
Board member Mary McCarty, a Republican county commissioner, said an unprecedented second machine recount could begin Friday and is expected to take eight hours.
Browning, the top state official in charge of elections, flew from Tallahassee with an attorney and a spokeswoman Wednesday to advise county officials.
He expressed concern about the possible erosion of public faith in the accuracy of vote counts and acknowledged a number of legal questions are in play over whether officials may authorize a second machine recount.
Palm Beach County election spokeswoman Kathy Adams said the county considered the recount question resolved.
Since the state rejected the county’s first certified result due to the confusing ballot count, Adams said any subsequent recount would be “considered a continuation of the machine and hand recount” rather than trying to break new ground with a second recount.
Before the weekend recount, Abramson, a West Palm Beach attorney who took on a 23-year incumbent, led by 17 votes out of about 90,000 cast in the contest.
The Labor Day weekend machine recount came up with only about 99,000 ballots, and officials have been working since then to clear up the discrepancy.
Browning said the problem was “an administrative issue of the way the ballots were handled” by county election officials – not a problem with the machines counting the new optical scan votes.
The county apparently failed to feed all of the election night ballots into voting machines for the weekend recount.
But Browning said “Palm Beach voters should be confident” that the system will work properly in the November presidential election when perhaps five or six times as many people will vote.
“There’s still some things that can be done to shore up Palm Beach’s election process,” he said.
Browning declined to say if the primary election was mishandled by Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson, who finished last in a three-way contest last week.
Browning said he suggested the county should review its election-night cartridge counts from precincts and add early votes and absentee ballots to determine exactly how many people voted Aug. 26.
But Palm Beach County officials opted for a hand count. That process simply counted the ballots without looking at votes in the Wennet-Abramson race.
Election workers sat in pairs at tables in a warehouse-style building that serves as the election tabulation center adjacent to Palm Beach International Airport.
The process of determining the total number took much longer than anticipated as officials searched for the remaining ballots. |
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