High turnout, crowded ballots and computer glitches bring early voting to a crawl in Hillsborough.
By JEFF TESTERMAN nd JEFF SOLOCHEK
Published October 28, 2004
TAMPA - Hillsborough voters waited in line as long as three hours to vote Wednesday as a record-breaking turnout continued at the county's 11 early voting sites.
"The number of voters has been going up every day, and we expect that trend to continue," said Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson. "If it does continue, we should see more than 70,000 voters cast their ballots in early voting."
A short delay was reported at some early voting sites as poll workers at the county's nine regional libraries lost computer service briefly Wednesday afternoon and were unable to use laptops to verify voter registrations with the elections database.
Rogelio Dean, the county's director of information technology, said the connection was lost for less than a half-hour when a switch connected to the libraries' computer server began to fail about 1 p.m. Pollworkers used cell phones to make registration checks for the 30 minutes or so before the switch was repaired, Johnson said. "It was like having a flat tire," he said. "You fix it and get back on the road."
Early voting at the Jimmie B. Keel Library on Bearss Avenue caused gridlock in the parking lot as voters showed up by the minute, but left in dribs and drabs. At one point, the wait exceeded three hours. For about 25 minutes, no one voted at all.
"When we first went in (at 11:30 a.m.), we heard people say it was an hour wait," said Rick Drake of Lutz. "It was moving pretty good until, apparently, the server went down."
Without computers to verify voters' eligibility, the line dragged as one pollworker called downtown to determine whether each voter could vote. Drake finally voted at 2:30 p.m.
Elsewhere, the brief loss of the elections laptops appeared to have little effect on the wait. Delays continue to be caused mostly by a limited number of voting machines and the time some need to get though a lengthy ballot complicated by eight constitutional amendment questions.
At 2 p.m. at College Hill Library in east Tampa, for instance, 12 residents waited in line to have their registrations checked. Then they got in a line to vote, behind about 40 others.
"The laptops went down for a little while," said early voting site manager Louise Brantley. "But people are having to wait because some voters are just slow readers."
Hillsborough elections officials have already counted more than 43,756 early voters since early voting began Oct. 18 - four times more than all early votes in the entire 15-day period prior to the Aug. 31 primary.
In Pasco County 2,551 people voted Wednesday, including 1,032 Democrats and 1,058 Republicans. That was the second-highest number of ballots cast so far. Tuesday's vote set the record at 2,763. The county's overall tally since Oct. 18th is 17,465.
Early voting continues through Nov. 1. In Hillsborough there are voting machines at nine regional libraries and at the elections office downtown and on Falkenburg Road. For a complete list of site addresses with opening and closing times, go to www.votehillsborough.org
