By BILL VARIAN and JEFF TESTERMAN
Published September 2, 2004
TAMPA - Susan Valdes hit the sack Tuesday close to midnight, still not knowing how her bid for the school board turned out in Hillsborough's primary election.
The vote totals were stalled so long she gave up.
But she tossed and turned, and tossed some more. Then she jumped out of bed, hopped in the car with her daughter, and drove to the elections office in Brandon to find out who won.
"I just couldn't sleep," she said. "I saw the same numbers on the television over and over and thought, "My goodness.' I just thought something was up."
Something was up all right, and Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson still is trying to figure out what. He does know that sometime around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, the computer that counts votes ground to a crawl without explanation.
Valdes wouldn't learn the outcome of her four-person race until 5:10 a.m. Wednesday when the final tally of the previous day's races was achieved at last.
In between, Valdes' nerves kept her awake, as people from other campaigns slept on stackable chairs around her at the Election Service Center on Falkenburg Road. Even canvassing board members, on hand to monitor and certify a count that wouldn't come, stole away for catnaps.
It turned out to be one of the slowest vote counts in the state, one that could draw unwanted attention Johnson's way as the presidential election looms.
"The important thing is that every vote was counted," Johnson said. "It just took a little longer than we expected. That was irrelevant to the integrity of the vote."
The last presidential election, with its disputed results and recounts, brought unrelenting national ridicule for the Sunshine State. It prompted a state ban on unreliable punch card voting machines.
Hillsborough officials replaced them with touch screen machines that record votes electronically. Those have been criticized for lacking a paper trail, and Tuesday's glitch gives critics more to question.
Johnson, a Republican, faces his own election in November. A former legislator, he was appointed to the supervisor's post last year by Gov. Jeb Bush to replace Pam Iorio, who is now Tampa mayor.
He inherited the $12-million touch screen system Iorio bought from Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia, based in Oakland, Calif., has sold more than 48,000 voting devices in 35 states.
Rob MacKenna, who won the Democratic nomination for Hillsborough supervisor of elections on Tuesday, wasted no time in seizing on Johnson's vote-counting problems.
"It's interesting," MacKenna mused Wednesday. "Pinellas is about the same size as Hillsborough, it uses the same equipment, it has about the same number of voting sites and it managed to get the vote counted in good shape."
Pinellas, like most Florida counties, had vote totals in well before midnight Tuesday.
MacKenna, a designer of data processing systems for the Eckerd Corp., said Tuesday's struggles may have less to do with the equipment than Johnson's capability in using it.
"This is an issue of managing a technical system, and it sounds like they didn't do a good job of volume testing their system," he said. "I guess Buddy is learning on the job, but this is too important to have something like this happen while he's learning."
In interviews Tuesday and Wednesday, Johnson said he does not think Tuesday's slowdown has anything to do with his server's hardware power to handle large volumes of data. The system was tested for accuracy more than three weeks ago, he said. However, he said Wednesday the system had not been subjected to tests that simulate the heavy data load of an election. That was being done late Wednesday. Initial results indicated that some adjustments may be needed in the way the computer processes information from vote cartridges.
"It's a technical issue that happens, and we've been all over it," Johnson said late Wednesday. "It looks like we're approaching a resolution."
A resolution is particularly urgent since the Nov. 2 election could draw three times as many voters. Tuesday's turnout was 24 percent. A larger number of voters increases the chances for slowdowns.
Johnson said the same equipment was used in 2002, a much larger election, without incident.
Three other counties use the same Sequoia touch screen gear, but none had the extreme delay.
Hillsborough recorded 138,389 ballots cast. Pinellas, with 130,482 ballots, had its votes counted by 10:40 p.m. on election night. And Indian River County, with a much smaller constituency of 27,012 voters, had a final count at 9:24 p.m. Tuesday.
Palm Beach County, with 182,830 voters casting ballots, was also slow in arriving at final vote numbers, with the final tally recorded by 3:15 a.m. Wednesday. Officials there and with Sequoia said that delay resulted from a more deliberate method of counting votes in a county with 693 precincts, compared to 360 in Hillsborough.
Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach elections supervisor who devised the confusing butterfly ballot made infamous in the 2000 election, lost her bid to keep her job when Tuesday's votes finally were counted.
Johnson said things seemed to be moving smoothly at first on Tuesday. Voter cartridges were sailing in. By 7:30 p.m., his staff had already posted some 26,000 absentee and early ballots results.
But by 8:30 p.m., Hillsborough workers realized there was a problem. The server began tabulating votes at roughly a one-twelfth to one-fifteenth its normal speed. They employed a backup server, to little avail.
By the time Valdes arrived, Hillsborough Commissioners Jim Norman and Tom Scott, both members of the canvassing board, had their tie knots hanging low. Elections staff members were gathered around computer monitors, gesticulating.
Norman and Scott retired to their cars after 1 a.m. to get some sleep, emerging a couple of hours later with bloodshot eyes. Young volunteers with Josh Burgin's District 62 state House campaign dozed on stackable chairs.
Mark Proctor, a consultant who was working on two campaigns, had been a guest on a election night TV program for Hillsborough County government. He popped in to see what was up.
"We were live on the air and the results weren't coming in so we decided to cancel the show," he said.
Valdes would ultimately leave tired, but with a smile, knowing she received the most votes in her race and was headed for a runoff. The Burgin camp left tired and disappointed after a second-place finish.
Sometime during the night, a visitor to the elections center left a business card on the table where the coffee was located. It advertised the services of "Pixie," a clown.
"Available for parties & any fun thing a clown would make funner," the card read.
Johnson could have used her services Tuesday.
Times researcher Cathy Wos and staff writer Jonathan Milton contributed to this report.
