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In Pinellas, count clicked into chaos
By EDIE GROSS © St. Petersburg Times, published November 16, 2000 LARGO -- They stood in the same spot for five or six hours without food, drink or casual conversation, 10 women shoving hundreds of thousands of ballots into vote-tally machines. Strangers pressed against the windows around them, hoping to glean which way the race was going on this election night. But they forged ahead, each with her own hypnotic rhythm, snatching and feeding ballots as the machines whirred. As the night progressed, trays of uncounted ballots piled up behind them. The women understood that quickness and efficiency were expected, but not at the expense of accuracy. Nevertheless, at least one of the workers -- if not more -- made a series of mistakes that put Pinellas County under the nation's magnifying glass. More than 900 ballots were counted twice. More than 1,400 others were not counted at all. Discovered during two days of recounts, the blunders revealed startling results: George W. Bush would lose 61 votes that had been erroneously awarded him on election night, and Al Gore would gain another 417 -- one of the largest vote swings in Florida. All this in a state where a mere 300 votes separate the candidates. Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark said she thinks she knows who made the errors. But she refused to divulge the information. "I take credit for the mistakes, and it stops there," Clark said. What hasn't stopped are questions about how an elections office, often hailed as one of the finest in the state, could now find itself entangled in one of the most vexing moments in state election history. Interviews with six of the 10 county employees who staffed the vote-tally machines on Nov. 7 reveal that some of the workers were overwhelmed by the record spike in absentee voter ballots that poured into the elections office. And it's those ballots, Clark and others admit, that played so heavily in a series of election-night errors. Wednesday, the day after the election, ballot counter Deborah Fulton was so worried when she heard there had been miscounts that she e-mailed Donna Daloisio, who ran the tabulation room. Fulton, who had counted ballots only one other time, wanted to know if she was responsible. Relief flooded over her when she discovered her counts were fine. "When I found out I wasn't (involved), I was so relieved," said Fulton, who, like several other counters, works outside the elections office but was specially trained for the election-night job. "I just kept feeling terrible that something had happened." Fulton said she and some of her fellow counters had a difficult time counting absentee ballots, many of which were in poor physical condition. Some of the cards were torn and wrinkled. A few had scotch tape stretched across the back of them. Others looked like they had been stabbed with a screwdriver rather than properly punched with a stylus. "It looked like some of them were punched with an Uzi," Clark said. "You can't imagine." The tally machines had trouble with those mangled ballots, so operators had to stop and start their count over and over and over again. "There were so many absentee ballots turned in, and I think that's where the problem was," Fulton said. "We had many, many problems with absentee ballots. I had many that were torn. If it's not a full-size ballot, it won't read it." It did not help that Pinellas set records this year in the number of absentee ballots filed. In the 1992 presidential race, voters returned 38,325 absentee ballots. In 1996, that number dropped to 34,076. This year, voters filled out a whopping 47,274, not including another 244 that could still come from overseas voters by Friday. "It was constant from 7 o'clock 'til 11:30. We never stopped. There's a point in time where the precinct boxes are coming in faster than we can process them," said Barbara Jordan, a county utilities employee who earned $8 an hour counting ballots on election night. "Time just flew by. We were so busy we didn't have a chance to look up. We were going hot and heavy." Most of the tabulation problems in Pinellas County can be traced to five batches of absentee ballots. In two of those groups, 937 ballots were counted twice. In three other batches, 1,435 ballots were overlooked. How so many ballots escaped the reading machines remains a mystery. Explaining the double-counted ballots is a bit easier; simply forgetting to push a button on the tally machine can cause ballots to be counted twice. Picture a tray of 300 unread ballots resting on a table to your right. In front of you is the vote-tally machine and to your left is an empty tray where you place processed ballots. You have small hands, so you only load 100 ballots into the machine at once. You put the first 100 in, and the machine reads them just fine, so you place them in the tray to your left. You press the "mark" button, which tells the machine to keep a running tally. You feed the second 100 ballots, and they go through too. You hit "mark" again. When you add the last 100, 50 go through before the machine stops on a ballot it cannot read because of its poor condition. Before starting over with those ballots, you have to hit the "undo" button to subtract the 50 the machine just counted. Otherwise, when you get done, you'll have a count of 350 rather than 300. "If you don't clear that button -- hit undo -- that's how you get re-read ... where people are not paying attention," Fulton said. A mistake like that does not always spell disaster. If the batch of ballots is from a regular precinct, a ballot counter can compare her total with the total compiled by a poll worker in the field. That's not the case with absentee ballots. Election workers usually know exactly how many absentee ballots they have up through the day before the election. But it is difficult to track absentee ballots that arrive on Election Day. Not having an accurate count on Election Day makes it impossible to know how many should be counted on election night. So double-counting some ballots while ignoring others could go unnoticed. Usually, election officials know the following day how many absentee ballots they should have. They use those numbers to reconcile how many were counted the night before. But Pinellas officials skipped that reconciliation process this year in their hurry to begin the mandatory statewide recount. Because of the large swing Gore's way, Republican lawyers from Washington, Austin and other parts of Florida have descended on the Pinellas County elections office, looking for irregularities in the vote tallying process. Angel Andersen, who has helped out with elections in Pinellas and Hernando counties for 15 years, said she had no problems counting ballots in the Largo tabulation room on Nov. 7. Mistakes are made -- and corrected -- every year, she said. "I'm really devastated by this election because it wasn't any different than any other election," she said. "If it went on this time, it's been going on. It happens, it just happens. When you do the second count, the machines catch it. I just want everyone to get over it." For the city elections in March, Clark said she will dedicate some staff to keep track of all absentee ballots that come in on Election Day. That way, they will know by the end of the night, rather than the next day, if any of the absentee totals are off. "We're going to revise the procedures to give the competent staff we have some more safeguards, so if we make a mistake, we know it election night and not the day after," Clark said. "We will find a way. It's not a "whether' or an "if,' it's a "when."'
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