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Home My WebLink AboutElection_Post_03/11/2010ELECTIONS 2110 YOUR VOTE STARTS HERE Election's boss defends accuracy over speed Handling of cartridges, How vote -counting should work delivery problems held up At precincts in Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens and Tequesta, a problem with memory cards forced election Tuesday night's results. officials to use the backup paper ballots to count votes Tuesday night. Here's a look at the process: By WILLIE HOWARD and BILL DIPAOLO Palm Beach Post Staff Writers A trouble-free election night it wasn't. But unlike some past glitchy elections in Palm Beach Coun- ty, the White House wasn't at stake and nobody seemed to be challenging the results. Even so, Web site problems, corrupted voting -machine memory cartridges and the late arrival of ballots from Del- ray Beach delayed the posting of complete election results until just after midnight fol- lowing Tuesday's municipal elections. County Elections Supervi- sor Susan Bucher said the results were tabulated at her office's elections service cen- ter in Riviera Beach just after midnight — half an hour later than during last year's munici- pal elections. She said she would rather produce an accurate count than a fast one. "We'd rather spend the night and get it right than to get something wrong and have to fix it tomorrow," said Bucher, whose office tallied results from 16 cities, towns and villages. Some of the county's past elections have faced far more serious problems, includ- ing questions about their accuracy. Examples include the infamous "butterfly bal- lot" kerf iffle of 2000, which helped tip the White House to George W. Bush, as well as some subsequent local elec- tions in which the supervisor's office provided incorrect infor- mation about who had won. Bucher was elected in 2008 after criticizing then -Supervi- sor Arthur Anderson for a range of problems, including inaccurate tallies and the late reporting of results. On Tuesday night at the Square Grouper in Jupiter, supporters of mayoral candi- date Jimmy Burg who came WHAT WENT WRONG On Tuesday night, some cartridges were corrupted when poll workers removed them before shutting down the ballot scanners. The problem affected five precincts in Jupiter plus precincts in Palm Beach Gardens and Tequesta — out of 262 precincts county wide. �#J After the polls close, the sealed, numbered ballot boxes and the voting machines' memory packs are driven to city hall. City clerks drive the materials, usually with police escorts, to the county elections supervisor's tabulation center in Riviera Beach. Memory cartridge After marking ballot, voter feeds it into an optical . scanner. 4 If the ballot is properly marked,the machine accepts it and records the votes electronically on a memory cartridge. The machine then deposits the paper ballot in a secure bin. Ballot scanner Paper ballot Ballot capture bay Memory i.y cartridge ~" reader Memory cartridge — At the tabulation center, each cartridge is fed into a reader, which uploads the results to a database that accumulates the vote totals from all the cartridges. If a cartridge cannot be read, the paper ballots serve as a backup. Source: Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office BRENNAN KING/Staff Artist More election coverage Boynton Beach: Stance on police headquarters probably hurt candidate's chances. 1B Pahokee: J.P. Sasser hopes to `restore Pahokee's respect.' 3B See ELECTIONS, 4A ► Online: The latest news, results. PaimBeachPost.com/go/elections + 4A THE PALM BEACH POST • THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 2010 Late tallies disappoint many waiting up for results ► ELECTIONS from lA to the waterfront bar ex- pecting a celebration were disappointed by the delay. When the band stopped playing at 11 p.m., Pat and Bill Magrogan were among those who had to go home without knowing the final results. (Burg wound up losing to incumbent Karen Golonka.) "Sure, people were sad we didn't know who won," said Magrogan, a longtime Jupiter resident who has volunteered to work at Palm Beach County poll- ing places since the 1960s. "But people understand that mechanical problems happen." In contrast, Broward County tallied its votes from five municipalities and 77 precincts by 9 p.m., except for provisional bal- lots, said Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Brow- ard elections supervisor. Palm Beach County's 16 -municipality election involved 262 precincts. Bucher said her staff works hard but that many of the delays were caused by circumstances beyond her office's control. Reasons for Tuesday night's delays included: ■ Ballots and voting ma - Ballot box blunders Palm Beach County has had more than its share of voting problems during the past decade. Among them August 2008: A razor -thin margin in a judicial race triggered a recount marred by the disappearance of 3,500 ballots. More than five months later, after multiple recounts, the state Supreme Court ruled that the eventual winner, suspended attorney William Abramson, was not fit to serve on the bench. July 2008: Nearly 700 votes were not counted until two days after a West Palm Beach special election because elections officials were not aware of a new security feature in the tabulating software. The new votes did not change the winner but reversed the second- and third-place finishers. January 2008: A defective cartridge holding early -vote results delayed election night totals and caused elections officials to stop reporting how many precincts had been tallied. A glitch had stalled early voting the week before the election, causing some voters to be turned away. March 2007: The company that designed the county elections Web chine cartridges from Del- ray Beach did not arrive at the county's tabulation center in Riviera Beach until after 10 p.m. Delray Beach City Clerk Chevelle Nubin said the clerk overseeing five precincts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church was 2000 staff file photo by GREG LOVETT The infamous butterfly ballot: The county's confusing punch cards led to one of the country's most controversial elections, ultimately ending with George W. Bush becoming president. site took the blame for a glitch that led to inaccurate results being displayed for some races. March 2006: A stack of absentee and provisional ballots from Pahokee was mistakenly added to Mangonia Park totals, leading elections officials to report the wrong winner in the Mangonia Park election. careful about checking paperwork and did not deliver the results from those precincts to city hall until 9:35 p.m. From city hall, the votes had to be driven to Riviera Beach. ■ The supervisor's Web site, wwwpbcelections.org, could not be updated for March 2002: Fourteen poll workers were reprimanded and a 15th fired for failing to turn in all of their voting machines' memory cards on time, causing delays in the counting. The losing candidate in a tight Wellington council race filed suit to challenge the new voting system after voters said they had problems using the touch -screen machines. November 2000: The county's 'butterfly ballot' punch cards led to one of the most controversial elections in U.S. history. The ballots, listing presidential candidates on two facing pages with a single column of punch holes between them, led thousands of would-be Al Gore voters to vote for Pat Buchanan. Others cast invalid votes for more than one candidate. After a series of suits and recounts, George W. Bush was declared the winner by a margin of 537 Florida votes. more than an hour, ham- pering people who wanted to know the progress of the counting. The company that hosts the site, Tampa - based SOE Software, said a file uploaded from the supervisor's office at 8:15 p.m. had become con — Compiled by staff researcher Michelle Quigley rupted. The file. finally uploaded at 9:20 p.m. The supervisor's Web site was subsequently updated four more times by 12:19 a.m. Wednesday, according to SOE Software records. ■ Memory cartridges affecting five Jupiter pre- cincts as well as precincts in Palm Beach Gardens and Tequesta were corrupt- ed and could not be read. That problem typically happens when poll workers neglect to shut down the voting machines before re- moving the cartridges. Bucher's office got the results from those pre- cincts by doing a machine count of the paper ballots, which serve as a backup. The count for Jupiter end- ed just before midnight. Clerks in Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens said ballot boxes containing pa- per ballots and voting ma- chine cartridges in sealed bags were delivered with police escorts to Riviera Beach around 9 p.m. — about the same time as in previous elections. "Everything went fine on our end," Palm Beach Gardens Town Clerk Patri- cia Snider said. It's not the first time problems have plagued the cartridges. During a special congressional pri- mary in February, seven voting machine memory packs were corrupted, af- fecting nine precincts. Where humans are in- volved, mistakes happen, Bucher said. O bill_dipaolo@pbpost.com p willie_howard@pbpost.com L