Lack of training blamed in election

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

posted 09/16/02



MIAMI -- Eleven other Florida counties had the same kind of touch-screen voting machines used in Miami-Dade County, where voting irregularities have tied up another major election.

They were operated by similar crews of mainly senior-citizen volunteers who had worked low-tech elections for years.

So why did Tuesday's primary go so well in those places and so miserably here? For starters, those other counties trained their poll workers up to three times longer than Miami-Dade.



Most had their machines longer then Miami-Dade did, and they didn't experience the same cascade of last-minute technical glitches that faced the state's most populous county.

"We kept modifying procedures," Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor David Leahy said Sunday as workers continued going through machines to retrieve uncounted votes. "We had to train and retrain. But going into the election, we thought we had it covered."

Results of Florida's Democratic gubernatorial race are on hold until final totals can be tabulated this week.



The state's certification deadline is Wednesday. Based on unofficial results, Tampa lawyer Bill McBride leads former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno by about 8,000 votes.

In the 2000 presidential election, it was Palm Beach's confusing butterfly ballot that drew ridicule.

Other counties had punch card ballots plagued by hanging and dimpled chads.

This time, it's Miami-Dade's touch-screen terminals and overwhelmed poll workers.

Retiree Jack Wile said he trained with some 40 others on the new iVotronic machines for about four hours. He has a computer and understood the instructions but says only about four people in the class seemed to grasp the nuances of the system.



"The rest of the people who were in the class were in a fog," said Wile, an assistant precinct clerk. "Some of them couldn't even figure out where to sign the sheet to show that they took the class."

Precinct clerk Dorothy Walton, who has been working polls since 1973, said she came away from training without knowing exactly how to close out the machines at day's end. She said she didn't ask questions because she was supposed to have a helper who did know.



The helper didn't show up Tuesday.


Workers in Pasco and Sarasota counties got 12 hours of training, and Sarasota County required them to pass a written test.

But in Miami-Dade, where the ballots were in English, Spanish and Creole, workers weren't even required to prove basic literacy.



And there were other problems:



A lengthy bidding process meant Miami-Dade didn't get all of its 7,250 machines until June.

They had to be tinkered with right up to the eve of the election, and instruction manuals still were being updated a month after workers completed their training.


Software required for the trilingual ballot increased the machines' boot-up time from six minutes to about 10. And because an antifraud feature prevented workers from booting the machines up before 6 a.m., Wile said, it was impossible to get all 17 of his precinct's machines ready by the 7 a.m. start time.



Clerks were told they could open with just a few machines, but some sites waited for hours until all of their machines were ready.



Wile opened on time with six machines.



Poll workers were told to call a help desk if necessary, but when Walton tried that she got no answer.



"I called and called and called," she said.


Elections Supervisor David Leahy, who is facing cries for his removal, described it all as akin to shoveling sand against the tide.

"We had almost 100 people in the field, which is far more than we had before," he said. "Before election day it sounded like a reasonable plan."