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JEFF TESTERMANA series of problems, not always of his own making, have been a baptism of fire for Buddy Johnson and fueled an election foe's criticism.
TAMPA - BuddyFreddys co-founder Buddy Johnson likes to say that managing an election is like running a restaurant.
"Everything comes together on one day," he says.
But at his Plant City buffet, Johnson never served 325,000 customers on one day while the rest of the country was looking over his shoulder. And that's the prospect Johnson faces on Tuesday, even after a giant mailout of absentee ballots and a record-setting early voting turnout.
Appointed Hillsborough elections supervisor last year, Johnson has put his imprint on local elections during a period in U.S. history where popular participation, partisan sentiment and media scrutiny have never been higher.
So far, it's been a mixed bag. Johnson, the supervisor no one elected, has overseen a staff he never hired and is managing a $13-million electronic voting system he didn't select. He has stumbled a few times, only to recover and guarantee that the general election would be better because of the learning experience.
"When we stubbed our toe, we've come to the fore and learned from it," Johnson said. "I think we're going to have the most successful election we've ever had because of our preparation for it."
Johnson, 52, a three-term GOP legislator who also directed the Florida Division of Real Estate, drew praise for a near-flawless election in the presidential primary in March. But that vote had a single question on the ballot and attracted just 38,308 voters.
Things were different in the Aug. 31 primary, when 138,389 voters showed up.
After the polls closed, Johnson's computer servers ground to a crawl, delaying final tabulation until 5:10 a.m. the next day.
Later, Johnson said Sequoia Voting Systems, the Oakland, Calif., manufacturer of Hillsborough's touch screen voting equipment, had diagnosed the problem as a malfunction in the computer indexing system that made computers repeatedly search through an entire database.
He also said the Sequoia system does "contain a method for testing and correcting whether the indexes are functioning," but said the test had not been part of normal pre-election procedures. It would be in the future, he pledged.
"The good news is that we have identified and corrected the problem and we are ready to conduct a successful election on Nov. 2," Johnson said.
Johnson stressed that the primary tabulation, while slow, had been accurate.
Two and a half weeks later, Johnson corrected himself. It had not been accurate.
On Sept. 17, Johnson revealed that 245 votes cast at the West Gate Regional Library early voting site were never counted because a staffer had left the machine in "test" mode and no one noticed. The 245 votes did not change the outcome of any race.
But the effort of 245 voters had been for naught, a fact that had County Commissioner Kathy Castor calling Johnson to task at a commission meeting.
Asked to provide a full accounting, Johnson failed to say his staff looked for the lost votes for 13 days after first spotting the 245-vote discrepancy. He also said he disclosed the 245-vote problem as soon as he could.
Actually, Johnson's staff identified the 245 votes on Sept. 15. Then, on Sept. 16, Johnson faxed a letter detailing the discovery to Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood. Finally, about 4 p.m. on Sept. 17 - after huddling with two executives from the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm - Johnson notified news media of the 245-vote problem by e-mail.
Johnson said he was "deeply disappointed" that this error occurred, and said his office was implementing additional management systems to keep it from happening again.
The next problem for Johnson cropped up on Oct. 18, the opening day of early voting in Florida. Johnson has pushed early voting and has expanded from three sites in the presidential primary to 11 for the general election. But a combination of factors conspired to force some impatient voters to leave early voting sites without casting ballots.
First, early voters showed up in unexpectedly high numbers. Then, the nine libraries housing early voting sites lost their Internet connection when a router in the Washington area belonging to Level 3 Communications failed.
The Internet connection enables poll workers to tap into the main elections database to verify registration data and to note that the voter has cast a ballot so the person can't vote again.
When the Internet was lost, Johnson's poll workers went to Plan B, a much slower system of verifying data by phone. Lines lengthened. Voters fumed. A day later, Johnson and the county technical staff announced they had developed a backup plan to reroute the library sites to another Internet connection.
Johnson's election opponent, Eckerd Corp. computer programmer Rob MacKenna, asked: "Why didn't he have this backup plan before he needed it?"
So it has gone. Johnson has been guided by good intentions, plagued by problems not always of his own making, then forced to make improvements that left voters wondering if all the contingencies have been covered for the Big One Tuesday.
Another example is Johnson's Web site, developed with a $141,239 contract with a Tampa software company SOE Software.
Johnson bought it for its state-of-the-art bells and whistles. He had it translated to Spanish for Hispanic voters.
He provided a system where voters can type in their address and get their voting precinct, complete with a map to the site.
In another area, a color bar chart even shows early voting totals by day for each of the county's 11 sites, so a voter can see which site is busiest or might have the shortest lines.
Johnson has called his Web site "the best in the state."
Not everyone agrees. Early this summer, University of South Florida political science professor Susan MacManus called Johnson's office to complain of "badly outdated data" on the elections Web site and said it was one of the "least user friendly" she had used, according to an e-mail to SOE Software from Dan Nolan, Johnson's chief of staff.
"Buddy is not happy," Nolan warned SOE in the e-mail. "I am not happy."
Months later, despite upgrades, corrections and $150-an-hour service calls by SOE, Johnson's Web site remains a flawed work in progress. Among the problems:
Some historical data are incorrect.
A search of 2002 County Commission races reveals wrong vote percentages in a handful of races.
Johnson blamed the bad 2002 data on his predecessor, Pam Iorio, now Tampa's mayor. He said it resulted from hand-posted statistics, whereas his office relies on computer generated stats.
But a search of the data for the Aug. 31, 2004 primary, an election Johnson did oversee, shows no listing of any vote total or percentage of vote for every candidate on the ballot.
The listing of candidates is incomplete. It omits candidates for mayor and City Council in Temple Terrace.
Johnson said those candidates don't file their qualifying papers at his office, as do candidates for the city of Tampa, so they were left off. He later said "they probably should be added."
As of Friday, the Temple Terrace slate was still missing from the list of candidates.
For three weeks after the Aug. 31 primary, no one in Johnson's office seemed to notice that the voter turnout figure on his Web site, displayed prominently at the top of his election results, was off by nearly 20,000 voters.
Johnson consulted with his technical staff and determined that computer code had not picked up the total turnout. He ordered the incorrect number, 118,699, removed, but never replaced it with the correct turnout figure of 138,389.
MacKenna said that reflects a lack of attention to detail.
"Technology is sort of like a loaded gun," MacKenna said. "If you know how to handle it, it can be a powerful tool. If you don't, you can shoot yourself in the foot."
Johnson said he will continue to upgrade his Web site and his office.
"I always say, there has never been a perfect election and there never will be," Johnson said. "But the touch screen machines we have performed flawlessly, and I am confident we will have a good, accurate election on Nov. 2."