>At 06:43 PM 9/10/2002 -0400, doug wrote:
>>[are things as bad as this press release says?]
More on Tuesday's primary in Florida below. Bush & Co. took the opportunity after Nov. 2000 to contract out and privatize our electoral system, and this is the result. For example, according to this article, the software company that supplied the machines had 64 staff on hand to 'help' in Miami-Dade alone. A photo in the Palm Beach Post showed the employee of a private company handling cartridges containing voting results. But hey, the private sector really does do it so much better ... so the poll workers must be to blame.
Jenny Brown
Miami Herald on Tuesday's elections (9-11-02 online edition):
[...] A measure of the tumult:
Shortly after 7 a.m., according to Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas, at least 178 of the county's 754 precincts reported some degree of problem.
At 9:45 a.m., 68 precincts were still completely closed to voters, and 110 precincts reported that at least half their machines did not work, he said.
By 10:50 a.m., 32 precincts were still closed -- and 45 operated at only half capacity.
By 4 p.m., all precincts were open, although some still had inoperative machines.
Perhaps more ominously, some South Floridians claimed that their party affiliations were erroneously listed on the rolls, rendering them ineligible to vote in the proper primary.
Others were handed improper documents by poll workers and had to argue for the chance to participate in their party's primary. Still others found that the precinct addresses listed on their new voting cards were incomplete or simply wrong.
In some ways, the problems exceeded those of two years ago, when virtually every precinct at least managed to open on time.
''I frankly think, what in the hell have they been doing for two years?'' said Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith, who announced the two-hour statewide voting extension.
The flood of complaints from South Florida began as polls opened -- or didn't -- at the appointed hour of 7 a.m. Many problems stretched deep into the day and to every corner of the region.
Some hardy, if unhappy, voters seemed determined to wait as long as necessary.
At 9 p.m., with the doors locked to new voters, 50 people still waited in line to vote at Premiere Eglise Baptiste Horeb, a church in North Miami. Several of the machines were inoperable for most of the day.
In Broward, where new Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant's grasp of her duties was questioned even before the election, the number of troubled precincts was difficult to obtain, but there appeared to be plenty of them.
At Sunrise Lakes Phase I in West Broward, a mostly older crowd waited more than three hours to vote.
''I've never seen anything like this,'' said Sid Liss, an elections clerk who had trouble getting the machines to work. ``I've been here since 5:30 this morning, and I'm ready to blow my stack.
''You tell Mrs. Oliphant she'd better leave for Shanghai, because she's in trouble,'' Liss said.
Though most South Floridians successfully cast votes, thousands experienced substantial delays and other complications. Many of them gave up completely or remained in line and vented anger in all directions.
The causes seemed to boil down to two familiar categories: poll workers and machinery.
Many South Florida precinct clerks and other key workers failed to show up, especially in Broward. Some of those who came to work seemed inadequately trained -- proving unable to activate the newfangled, ATM-type touch-screen machines that debuted Tuesday.
''How could this happen after what happened in 2000?'' said Lori Sugg, turned away from a polling place in Pembroke Pines after the precinct clerk, assistant clerk, registration book and machine activation devices were all missing in inaction. ``I don't understand.''
Election officials in Miami-Dade and Broward blamed most of the trouble on human error.
Gisela Salas, an assistant Miami-Dade supervisor of elections, said many poll workers simply failed to turn on the machines properly.
Each device must be booted up with an activator cartridge that must remain in the machine for six minutes. Many workers apparently pulled out those cartridges too soon, crashing the machines.
''A lot of the poll workers were not patient,'' Salas said.
Michael Limas, chief operating officer for Election Systems & Software, which made the machines, claimed that his equipment was blameless.
''When our technicians have gone to polling places, they haven't been repairing machines,'' he said. ``They've had to start the machines over for people.''
He said the failure to properly use the activator cartridges was like ``putting a floppy disk in your computer to copy a large file and popping it out before it's finished.''
David Leahy, Miami-Dade's elections supervisor, said ES&S had 64 technicians on duty in the county to handle problems.
Asked if that was enough technical support, Leahy smiled and said: ``Not given the problems we had. We didn't anticipate having these many problems.''
Even Reno was delayed in casting her vote because of machine trouble in Miami-Dade. ''I have to wait outside?'' an incredulous Reno asked poll workers.
Reno later demanded that Gov. Jeb Bush extend the voting. As a backup, she also filed an emergency court request to keep the polls open.
The result: Bush declared ''a state of emergency'' allowing him to suspend state law and order the polls to remain open two extra hours.
In the Orlando area, election officials had to count by hand 42 percent of Orange County's vote because the ballots were tearing as they were fed through optical-scanning machines. The county has nearly 426,000 voters.
In tiny Union County, officials said they would have to count all ballots by hand because their optical-scan system somehow showed that every vote cast was for a Republican candidate.
[...]
Miami Herald, Sept. 11, 2002 "Here we go again: Confusion reigns in sequel to 2000 election" BY MARTIN MERZER, JONI JAMES AND ALFONSO CHARDY mmerzer at herald.com