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Clark's election flubs draw fire
By LISA GREENE, Times Staff Writer
Voters gave rave reviews Tuesday to Pinellas County's new voting machines. Voting at most places went smoothly and most ballots were counted quickly. But because of an election staffer's mistake, more than 600 voters in Lealman didn't get to vote in a fire commission race, casting the outcome of the election in doubt and forcing Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark to apologize. So, was the latest chapter in Clark's eventful tenure as supervisor a success or failure? "The bottom line is, I think the machine element went very well," said County Commissioner Bob Stewart, who also is a member of the election canvassing board. "The human element still needs to be perfected." Political consultant Mary Repper said Tuesday's mistake was one too many for Clark, who took office in June 2000. Two years ago, the November election also was marked by human error. A Pinellas worker miscounted ballots in the November 2000 election, resulting in George W. Bush losing 61 votes and Al Gore gaining 417. "There have been problems since the minute she took over," Repper said. "At some point in time, you've got to quit saying 'I'm sorry' and make it work." But others were more kind. Even Kathleen Quinn Litton, the apparent loser in the Lealman race, said Clark "runs a good ship." "You do everything you can to keep from having human error problems, but it's always there ready to happen," Litton said. "This is one of those situations, where you can't watch every move everybody makes. The buck stops at the top, that being Deborah Clark. But everything's been handled very professionally and very sincerely." The canvassing board decided that Litton's opponent, John Frank, had won the election. Litton hasn't yet decided whether to challenge the result. Many observers said Tuesday's mistakes need to be kept in perspective. "I think she did okay under some difficult circumstances, particularly given this is the first general election with the new machines," political consultant Ed Armstrong said of Clark. "I think it's logical there would be a transition time, and I think this is it. Not all transitions go perfectly." County Commissioner Ken Welch said the Lealman issue was a "big problem" there, but a small one overall. Welch said serving on the canvassing board in the September election gave him a new understanding of how much work an election involves. "If you take a step back and look at the overall voting process in Pinellas County -- it was a brand new process, we had to train hundreds of poll workers -- and you look overall at how we performed, Deb did a good job," Welch said. Repper acknowledged that today's election supervisors are under far more pressure and scrutiny than they were before the 2000 election. But, she said, Clark's office has had problems that Hillsborough and Pasco counties have not. "Granted, this is not a Florida senate race, or even a County Commission seat, but to those folks who invested their time and effort, that election meant everything," Repper said. "There is not an election that's meaningless. It's all important. And they have a right to expect the process is going to run smoothly." Repper said Clark is a "very nice person" who has time to improve before she's up for re-election in 2004. Repper reeled off a list of woes: the 2000 miscounts; Clark's failure to disclose that her husband was working for a voting machine company bidding for Pinellas' business; and the last-minute revelation that the executive who would have managed Pinellas' elections for Sequoia Voting Systems, the company the county chose, was under indictment in Louisiana. Earlier this summer, Repper said, it took longer for her firm to get new precinct maps from Pinellas than other counties. Armstrong pointed out, however, that Pinellas' 24 municipalities and many fire districts make elections here harder to manage than contests elsewhere. That difference is directly related to Tuesday's problem, since the mislabeled ballots occurred in precincts split between Lealman and Pinellas Park or St. Petersburg. Despite Clark's apologies, she said Friday that she thinks the election went very well. "I'm really sorry she feels that way," Clark said of Repper. "Apparently she doesn't have as much faith in me as I have in myself." Clark said she thinks Pinellas residents will make a balanced judgment of her performance. "I think our voters are smart enough to know there's no such thing as a perfect election," she said. "They know we did the very best we can. They know how important this is to me, and that I give it everything I've got." Some of the highlights of Tuesday's election: The new touch screen machines are an unqualified success. Voters praised them as easy to use. They cited several features: the machines allow voters to review their picks before casting their ballot; they make it easy to fix mistakes; and they don't allow voters to pick too many candidates by mistake. Clark hired a public relations firm and new office staffers to run a massive voter education campaign. More than 70,000 voters tried out the machines before Election Day at civic lunches, shopping malls, and other events. Poll workers generally operated the machines correctly and returned every cartridge, the cassette that electronically records votes, to be counted. At one polling place, one precinct clerk was so well-versed that he rattled off a detailed account of how each machine's electronic memory works. Where the problems occurred: The mix-up in Lealman was the biggest problem. The mistake occurred after an elections staffer mislabeled the activator machines used to imprint the correct ballot style on plastic voting cards in five precincts. In a sixth precinct, a poll worker misread the labels. Compounding the problem, top elections officials didn't learn of the problems until late Tuesday and didn't figure out the full scope of what happened until late Thursday. Clark said she will increase testing of the activator machines and is working on a plan to improve communications among her staff on election day. Eighteen of the cartridges that record the votes cast on each machine couldn't be read electronically. This didn't affect results, but slowed getting final results by about 90 minutes Tuesday night because those results had to be typed into elections computers. This is the third election with unreadable cartridges. In Hillsborough and Palm Beach, which also use Sequoia machines, there were four unreadable cartridges and none, respectively. A Sequoia official said that may indicate a training problem in Pinellas, but Clark is talking to the company about fixes. It may be as easy as taping a seal over the cartridges so workers can't remove them too soon, she said. Twenty-two machines had to be replaced Tuesday -- 10 of them because they got wet in the elections office's leaky warehouse. Clark is working with the county to find better storage space. "I think . . . there are a lot more pluses this year, and a couple of things in the minus column," Clark said. "I'll never be perfect, but I always, always try to be better." -- Lisa Greene can be reached at 445-4162 or greene@sptimes.com
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