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Officials still searching for election glitch
By JEFF TESTERMAN, Times Staff Writer TAMPA -- Elections officials are still trying to determine why voting totals could not be electronically transmitted after Hillsborough County's first election using touch screen voting machines. Technicians are examining the computer hardware to see whether they can isolate the glitch. "As of today, we still have not pinpointed the problem," Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio said Friday. "We have had three Sequoia employees looking at it, but they have not gotten to the bottom of it." The county agreed to buy Sequoia Voting System's $12-million touch screen system after the Florida Legislature banned punch card balloting in the wake of the highly contested 2000 presidential election. The new machines got their first real workout Tuesday, and by all accounts performed well as 1,934 Plant city voters used their fingertips to elect Bill Dodson to the City Commission. The problem arose after the polls closed and poll workers attempted to transmit voting totals from 26 touch screen machines to Iorio's office. Data cartridges about the size of a thick credit card were pulled from each voting machine and plugged into readers connected to two laptop computers. Voting totals from two of the cartridges zipped to the elections office. For some reason, data from the other 24 went nowhere. A day earlier, a test of the cartridge data transmission system had gone off without a hitch. Tuesday night, Iorio's staff had to use a backup system to get the final tabulation. Printouts of the voting totals from each of the 26 machines were faxed to the elections nerve center on Falkenburg Road. It was slower, but accurate. Still, Iorio and Sequoia officials want to iron the bugs out now. This fall, Iorio expects to use 3,100 of the new voting devices when an estimated 65 percent of Hillsborough's 510,000 registered voters touch a computer screen to vote for a gubernatorial candidate and other politicians. With a full slate of local, state and federal candidates in November, the public will expect quick results from the Sequoia system. "This is one of our challenges," Iorio said. "With punch cards, we were until 2 in the morning getting presidential results to the media. Now we hope to get all results in by 8:30 or 9 p.m." Sequoia project manager Mike Frontera said his company's equipment is being used in some 40 counties nationwide and only Hillsborough has experienced this glitch. Frontera and two helpers replicated the problem Thursday, watching a laptop computer freeze when a cartridge was prematurely pulled from a reader. But he still could not rule out transmission line failure or hardware problems. So on Thursday, Frontera sent a Dell laptop computer and an Antec data reader to Oakland, Calif., where company technicians were to give the hardware the once-over. "I think the solution will be one of those things where you slap yourself in the head and say, 'Ah, that was easy,' " Frontera said. "Or maybe it was something like the full moon."
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