Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Two glitches, three missed absentee ballots and a mishandling of machine cartridges, are corrected quickly and do not affect the outcome.
By LISA GREENE, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 14, 2002
Two errors surfaced Wednesday in Pinellas County's first election using touch screen machines.
Neither error affected the outcome of the Clearwater City Commission races.
In one case, three absentee ballots were overlooked Tuesday and discovered Wednesday morning.
In the second, workers at one polling place didn't handle three machine cartridges correctly, so results for those machines had to be read from a paper print-out that each machine produces. The switch didn't change or delay any results.
In Palm Beach County, where voters also used voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, human errors were more serious, delaying that county's results past midnight. One poll worker took three cartridges from unused machines home at one precinct, and a cartridge was left behind at another polling place.
"You can never eliminate the human error element in an election," said Kathryn Ferguson, spokeswoman for Sequoia Voting Systems. "I think it's just the factor of it being the initial use for those people. I'm sure in September, they won't have the same problems."
Despite the glitches, Ferguson and Pinellas County officials said the elections were a success.
"We were extremely -- and I emphasize that -- pleased with the poll workers and what they did yesterday," said Joan Brock, deputy elections supervisor. "We felt very good about them. This was the first time on this."
Clearwater City Commissioner Bill Jonson, who is on the city's election canvassing board, said the mistakes were minor.
"It was one of those little learning experiences," he said. "The bottom line is that the election was very accurate."
Each voter's ballot is recorded in two places: inside the voting machine's electronic memory and on an electronic, removable cartridge. At the end of the day, the machine prints the results on paper, and poll workers remove each cartridge. Printouts and cartridges from the 164 machines used Tuesday were taken to the Election Service Center.
Tuesday night at the Fred Cournoyer Recreation Center, workers shut down seven machines correctly. But at three machines, a worker removed the cartridge and hit the machine's "close polls" button at the same time, said Sequoia vice president Mike Frontera.
When that happens, the data remains on the cartridge, but it can't be entered easily into the central computer. So elections officials used the paper printouts instead. Wednesday morning, they retrieved the three machines, and used new cartridges to double-check that the totals were correct.
Brock said her staff will stress the cartridge removal process to workers in future training sessions.
Also Wednesday, officials discovered three absentee ballots as they were checking the results. The ballots had not been removed from their envelopes, Brock said. Those ballots gave Ed Hart 3 more votes, Patricia Bates-Smith two votes and Hoyt Hamilton one vote.
Brock said the elections office also will review whether the machines need to be set up differently to give voters more privacy. A few voters said they felt the screen could be read too easily as they voted.
Many machines were set up on tables Tuesday instead of on their metal stands. It is possible that simply putting each machine on its stand would solve the problem, since the voter's body would block more of the screen, Brock said.