Palm Beach County Florida Still Having Election Trouble: Today's Votes of Incompetence

[Coyotl]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/palm-beach-county-florida-election_n_2025447.html


Nearly a dozen years after the notorious 2000 electoral debacle in Florida, Palm Beach County continues to struggle with election troubles. About 27,000 absentee ballots cast by early voters can't be digitally scanned because of a design mistake. Election workers on Monday began to manually duplicate the markings from the bad ballots to new ones, so that the votes will actually be counted............

The bad ballots failed to have a transition between local candidates and those in races for state Supreme Court justices. This made it impossible for tabulating machines to properly read and count roughly 27,000 ballots. So teams of two poll workers, one Republican and one Democrat, are looking at every ballot and marking a new ballot with the same choices.

...................

[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. I live in Palm Beach County

Our Supervisor of Elections is a Democrat. I swear the anxiety created by the 2000 Bush/Gore hanging chad fiasco has become self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm a poll worker and every poll worker must attend at least one class before an election, here in FL. Discussion about "we must redeem ourselves" was part of the training. 2 weeks later news of the ballot misprints came out...sigh...

[EC]

3. Since you are a poll worker and know the ones in Palm Beach...

I have to ask. Why don't they just hand count those ballots instead of copying them unto other ballots that a machine can read? Is there a law against hand count? It just seems REALLY STUPID to do it the way they are.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

6. I seems they believe that hand-counting will lead to chaos...

Remember the chaos created by the hanging chads in 2000? On election night, all of the ballots will removed from the scanners and counted (not the votes, but the actual ballots) If there is any discrepancy between what we find in the scanner receptacles and what the scanners' read out says we will recount until everything matches. The ballots are the paper trail, the scanners produce the vote counts...I know it sounds silly, but I think they may have the right of it this time. It's a small team, tightly monitored, which will do the copying.

[EC]

8. It is silly.

There are no hanging chads this time, are there? Aren't the ballots fill in the circle with black marker? How can that get chaotic? The ballots they are removing from the scanners will be the copies which could be wrong to begin with because of bad copying. How many times have people transposed things when copying? It's really easy to mess up when you add steps.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

10. Nope. The ballots are connect the 2 ends of an arrow with a line.

There will be plenty of double, triple and quadruple checking going on. These ballots will never go to the precincts, they will be scanned internally at the supervisor's office. The ballot is 6 pages long...do you know how easy it would be to screw up the hand count on down ballot issues? We have some important down ballot elections and 12 constitutional amendments to vote on. This decision was made after a careful review of all the options available. There will be messed up ballots on election day, but I doubt any of these will fall into that category.

I am much more worried about the reduction in the number of early voting days. The lines on Nov. 6th will be very long and redistricting has caused many to be reassigned to new precincts. I'm afraid some of those people won't go to their new precinct when they learn they can't vote in their old precinct. I worry that in this heavily Democratic district a bunch of 'True The Vote' morons will show up and try to intimidate voters. I'm worried that my dog will mess up all over my condo while I'm gone from 5:45 am until perhaps after 9 or 10 pm....and he's too timid to go out with a "stranger" I've lived here 10 months and he still won't go near any of my neighbors...I may have to board him, which will cost a fortune because it will mean 2 nights at the kennel.

[titaniumsalute]

4. The Florida teachers union

Was pushing absentee ballots hard. I also live in PB County. What is the best method of voting here?

[Sekhmets Daughter]

5. I prefer early in person voting...fewer people handling your ballot.

There are contradictory opinions regarding absentee ballots...they can be lost, mangled or mishandled. It is the easiest way to vote, but I'm not convinced it is the 'safest' way to vote. I was planning on going to the nearest early polling site, but then I was assigned to my own precinct. You can to to the Supervisor's site and find the early polling place nearest you. It is a user friendly site.


www.pbcelections.org

[titaniumsalute]

9. Hey thanks. I'll go vote this weekend.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

11. You're quite welcome!

[ffr]

2. At least they're catching this early

Hopefully it won't effect the outcome of what the voters intended.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

7. It shouldn't....

For one thing the Supervisor of Elections is a Democrat But the copying will be down by a small team, each ballot will be copied and checked by a Republican and a Democrat and these people are being closely monitored by both major parties.