More trouble with voting in Palm Beach County

Hard to believe, I know ... but Palm Beach County is having difficulty implementing their new voting system for the early voting period that began yesterday.

Martin and St. Lucie counties reported a smooth day at the polls, but voters at Palm Beach County's eight early-voting sites experienced delays ranging from a few minutes to 30 minutes or longer. Much of the wait occurred while poll workers verified voters' identities and precinct information, using laptop computers to connect to the state's database.

"I don't know how this is going to work when there's a lot of people here," voter Erica Nichols said after waiting for her ballot at Wellington Village Hall.

"I'm hoping it was Day One jitters," said Barbara Cheives of West Palm Beach after it took her about 20 minutes to get a ballot at the county's main elections office. Problems with her mother's ballot meant that the whole voting experience took 55 minutes even though few voters had shown up, Cheives said.

Besides the state's database glitch, some voters also reported problems with the county's new instant-ballot printers, along with a cumbersome process meant to ensure voters get the correct ballot.

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson said he was "extremely disappointed" with the delays caused by the state's database, "but it is something that is fully outside of our control."

Walton County in the Panhandle caused the problem with the 10.6-million-voter database, said Jennifer Krell Davis, a spokeswoman for Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning. She said Walton's system kept continuously reconciling its data instead of stopping when the updates were complete, thereby taking up an inordinate amount of memory in the state system.

Okay, fine, so we can blame Walton County for the database problem. Fair enough. But then why were things so smooth in Martin and St. Lucie counties?

Most counties avoided delays by using their own electronic records to check in voters at early voting sites, Davis said.

But Palm Beach County's voter database is set up so that elections officials must go through the state's voter registration system before getting access to the county's voter file, Davis said. She said it's the only county in the state with such a system.

Anderson said his system is set up that way because the state provides the most up-to-date information on voters who may have moved from one county to another.

Aha. Right. We're the only county that goes through the state system to check records. Wonderful.

Um, don't you think, Arthur, that rather than rely on a state system that might be glitchy or slow, we could be like every other county in the state and have our own system? I find it difficult to believe that we gain so much by our linkage to the state when no other county does that ...

Meanwhile, we're already having problems with the new instant-ballot printers and the optical scan machines? Having a paper trail was supposed to help election accuracy, not bog it down!

Look, Palm Beach County has been the laughingstock of elections since 2000. Haven't we had enough time to get it right? It's embarrassing, it's ridiculous, and if it screws up the fall election again, there's going to be hell to pay.

More election fun in Palm Beach County

The home of the infamous butterfly ballot continues to have problems.

Just one day after Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson announced that Palm Beach County may have to defy the new state law requiring a paper trail for voting because of prohibitive costs, he discovered that, oops, his math was a little off.

It turns out Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson's estimate of $1.25 a page to print optical-scan ballots - a figure that helped launch county commissioners into civil-disobedience mode and caused the state's top elections official to voice disbelief - was more than triple the actual cost, Anderson said Wednesday.

Anderson, slated to discuss his budget again with commissioners next week, said his office is crunching numbers and expects to come up with a "significant reduction" from the preliminary $5.9 million request for county tax money he presented to the commission Tuesday.

The county can get paper ballots printed and delivered for 40 cents a page, said Laurence Davenport, director of business affairs for the elections office, after getting a price quote Wednesday from vendor Sequoia Voting Systems.

That lops $1.36 million off the $2 million printing estimate Anderson gave commissioners the day before.

Anderson also told the board Tuesday he needs $3.9 million worth of new equipment to make the transition from paperless electronic voting to Florida's newly mandated system of paper ballots read by optical scanners. On Wednesday, the elections chief said that figure should come down, but he did not specify an amount.

Whew. Looks like Palm Beach County actually can comply with state law. How nice. I guess we've avoided another laughingstock elections incident ... for now.

Surprise! Voting irregularities plague Palm Beach County

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

Outraged candidates in Palm Beach County, many of them losers who thought they'd won their elections, lobbed criticism Wednesday at Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson for posting incorrect results on his office's Web site the night before.

Satisfying answers weren't to be found. As candidates pointed fingers, Anderson in turn placed the blame on a software company he hired.

It was the fourth election in the last year where some glitch or problem wreaked havoc with the results, the second because of software.

"It's just maddening that Palm Beach County can't seem to get it right," said Michael Bornstein, campaign manager for West Palm Beach mayoral candidate Al Zucaro, who lost after earlier declaring victory based on incorrect results. "Arthur Anderson got his job over the issue of making sure the election process is fair and can be trusted. For the last few elections that hasn't happened."

Anderson said Wednesday that a glitch in the software that puts the election results on the agency's Web site failed. He said that the column displaying the thousands in the vote tally was dropped in some races so that instead of, for example, reporting 6,758, the program reported 758.

You know, at some point it goes from being an "oops, my bad" to a serious problem. I think we're well into the serious problem stage.

The national attention focused on Palm Beach County in 2000 should have been a wake-up call to straighten out the election snafus. Why that hasn't happened yet is beyond me. Whatever the case, Anderson had better figure out a way to keep elections accurate and dependable. If these things happen again in 2008, well, I don't even want to think about going through that again.