Voting 101: How to tear that chad

Pinellas' elections chief says voters will be drilled on how to cast their ballots.

By EDIE GROSS

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 18, 2001

ST. PETERSBURG -- Think you don't need any help at the polls? Think again.

From now on, every voter who goes to a Pinellas County poll will get a complimentary lesson in how to insert a ballot into a voting machine and how to punch a clean hole.

Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark told more than 100 members of Tiger Bay on Wednesday that all voters in line at a polling place will be schooled in the proper procedures, starting with some 20 city elections in February and March.

"Even if we have to sit on them, we're going to give them a demonstration," Clark quipped before the lunchtime crowd at the St. Petersburg Suncoast Association of Realtors headquarters.

Absentee voters are not off the hook, either.

The elections office always includes an instruction booklet with the absentee ballot, but officials suspect that many voters ignore it. So this time, the ballots will include the regular instruction booklet and a neon yellow flier reminding absentee voters to PUNCH ALL THE WAY THROUGH their ballot cards and REMOVE ANY HANGING CHAD from the backs.

Educating voters and double-checking every step made in the ballot-counting room topped the list of changes Clark said she would implement in the next round of elections. Other efforts include:

Making sure on election night that the number of absentee ballots counted equals the number received, a step that used to wait until the day after elections.

Adding staff in the ballot-counting room to make sure the number of regular ballots counted equals the number of ballots collected at each polling place.

Holding election results until all the numbers have been double-checked.

Asking voters to remove hanging chad from the backs of their ballots before depositing them in the ballot box.

"On election night, we made some serious errors. I'll tell you that right up front. They were human errors," said Clark. "I got ahead of myself. I gave out information before we determined it was accurate or complete. I will try a lot harder to never do that again."

Most of the tabulation problems in Pinellas County occurred when 937 absentee ballots were counted twice on election night and another 1,435 ballots were overlooked. The mistake was discovered the next day and corrected, giving Al Gore another 417 votes and taking 61 from George W. Bush. But the incident damaged the credibility of the county's results.

Tiger Bay members had plenty of questions for Clark and state Sen. Jim Sebesta, R-St. Petersburg, a former Hillsborough County elections supervisor and a member of Gov. Jeb Bush's elections reform task force.

Was there an effort to disenfranchise minorities? asked Tom Dunn, a past president of Tiger Bay and St. Petersburg resident.

"There is no evidence of a conspiracy to disenfranchise anyone," Sebesta said. "There's been a lot of rhetoric about that in the press. I've not seen one iota of proof that actually happened."

Another member questioned the state's efforts to purge convicted felons from the voter lists, an exercise that inadvertently targeted plenty of non-felons. Clark and Sebesta said the list contained plenty of inaccuracies and the state would have to refine that process before relying on it again.

The Legislature is considering making the job of elections supervisor a non-partisan one.

In light of that, was it appropriate for Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the chief elections officer, to serve as co-chair for George W. Bush's Florida campaign? asked Mike Mayo, government affairs director for the Greater Clearwater Association of Realtors.

"Everyone has the right to do what they want to do," Sebesta said. "As long as it's free and open disclosure, I would support that."

Sebesta dismissed one man's concerns that a Republican Legislature has no incentive to update an elections process that handed victory to Bush.

"The incentive is to do what's right . . . and party affiliation has nothing whatsoever to do with that," Sebesta said.

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