Reforms working in many counties

Obscured by the failings of last week's primary election are stories in places like Gadsden County, home to a Panhandle town called Sawdust, where Supervisor of Elections Shirley Knight recently used a state grant of $137,844.62 to stunning effect.

The rural county just west of Tallahassee was ridiculed as the poster child for Florida's electoral woes after flopping miserably in the disastrous 2000 presidential recount. At the time, a whopping 12 percent of Gadsden voters cast ballots that could not be counted for president -- the worst showing in the state. Last week, thanks to new counting machines and a voter education effort by Knight, the instance of what sometimes is referred to as "voter error" had dropped to 2 percent.

"We're very proud of the voters here in Gadsden County," Knight said Tuesday of their response to her pre-election voting demonstrations. "We went out to everywhere we could go: community centers, stores, churches, under a tree -- wherever we found voters."

Gadsden was one of many counties that improved their performance over 2000, in some cases dramatically, according to a Times analysis that compared the presidential election to the Democratic primary for governor.

Of the 41 counties with new touch screen or optical scan voting systems, at least 24 improved when it came to voters casting ballots that would count. Eleven counties had not yet gathered the information required to calculate their performance. Six actually increased the percentage of ballots rendered incomplete by voters, but that was due to a large number of registered Democrats in those counties choosing to pass on the governor's primary, which is not considered an error.

Among the improved counties was Palm Beach, which became ground zero in 2000, but emerged last week with only 2 percent of its Democratic voters not making a selection in the top race on the ballot. That was down from 6 percent in 2000.

Duval County, notorious for its problems in 2000, improved its showing when it came to "voter error." It dropped from 9 percent in 2000 to 2 percent last week.

"They dealt with the problem," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida who chairs the Florida Elections Commission.

"What's the problem in South Florida?" she asked, referring to Broward and Miami-Dade counties, where scores of voters were turned away on Sept. 10 and thousands of votes went uncounted for days, the result of poor poll worker training.

The improved performance of many counties elsewhere in Florida suggests that much of the state's election reform is working -- once people make it into the voting booth, MacManus said. "It's not the equipment" causing problems in South Florida, she said. "It's got to be management."

The Times analysis looked at the Democratic gubernatorial primary to measure the number of potential votes "lost" because of mismarked ballots or the voter's decision to not make a choice in a race. Officials call this the "residual vote" or the "lost vote." It is sometimes called "voter error," though that term is disputed by some who say it's not accurate.

Either way, the statistic was a key measure of performance in 2001 when the Legislature looked at what happened in November 2000 and decided to reform Florida's election system. Today, the "residual vote" remains an important barometer as officials seek to measure the success of that reform.

The statistic includes "overvotes," which occur when voters make more than one selection in a race, nullifying their ballot.

Overvotes played a leading role in Florida's election problems in 2000. More than 113,000 Floridians made the overvote mistake in the presidential election. Many, including Gadsden County residents, were confused by ballots that displayed the 10 presidential candidates over two columns, giving the impression that the second column was a different race.

The problem was exacerbated by voting systems that did not catch the mistakes at the polls.

Since then, the Legislature and the Florida Division of Elections have made ballot layout and language more clear. Fifteen Florida counties have purchased touch screen voting machines that make it impossible to overvote. An additional 26 counties have gone to systems where voters must feed their paper ballots into scanning machines that catch overvotes before they leave the the polling place.

The result: Overvotes are becoming an endangered species in Florida.

Among the counties that were able to report their overvotes in the Sept. 10 primary, some significant improvements emerged.

In 2000, 11 percent of Gadsden County voters cast overvotes. Last week, the figure was down to three-tenths of 1 percent. In Duval County, nearly 22,000 people overvoted in the 2000 presidential race. Last week, in the race for governor, only three people made the mistake.

Several counties reported zero overvotes.

Harder to explain are the handful of counties that showed no improvement in the percentage of "residual votes" from 2000 or increased slightly.

Most of those high percentages are driven by a large number of "undervotes" -- instances where Democrats skipped the governor's race. These counties include Hamilton, Gilchrist, and Lafayette in the Panhandle and Collier and Sarasota in southwest Florida.

Ion Sancho, the Leon County elections supervisor, said the numbers in these counties might warrant "spot checks" of ballots to ensure voters are not mismarking them.

"I'm not suggesting that happened," he said. "But that needs to be examined more thoroughly. . . . We need to be very circumspect in this process."

MacManus said the numbers in those counties could be explained by the fact that many people pass up races in primaries. In addition, she said, many Democrats in those counties tend to be more conservative and vote Republican in state and national races.

Many, in other words, may not have made an error. They simply scoffed at the race between Bill McBride, Janet Reno and Daryl Jones.

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