TAMPA - In the Aug. 31 primary, the population of a small town - 12,498 voters - appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney.
No one is sure why those voters didn’t vote, or if they did, what might have happened to their votes.
Local residents declined to vote in even greater numbers in Hillsborough races for property appraiser, School Board and some judges. In fact, the “undervote” - the phenomenon in which citizens push an activation card into a touch screen voting machine but have no vote tallied for one or more races - was significantly higher in Hillsborough than in many other large Florida counties.
Palm Beach County, which uses the same Sequoia Voting Systems machines as Hillsborough, saw an undervote ranging from 3.1 percent to 8.4 percent of voter turnout, depending on the race. Broward, which uses optical scan voting machines, had an undervote of 6.4 percent on the one race open to all voters.
Hillsborough’s undervote on countywide contests ranged from 9 percent in the race that re-elected State Attorney Mark Ober, to a whopping 17.5 percent in the race in which Charles “Ed” Bergmann was elected circuit judge.
In Pinellas County, which uses Sequoia machines, the undervote on countywide contests ranged from 9.1 percent in a School Board race to 13 percent in a judicial contest.
The question is: Why?
Are voters refusing to vote? Or are votes not registering on electronic machines?
<snip>
Buddy Johnson, Hillsborough’s supervisor of elections, attributed the glitches to human error and believes voters should have complete confidence in the touch screen machines.
Johnson believes undervoting occurs when voters decline to vote because they know little about a race, or when they simply want to send a message that they don’t care for any of the candidates on a particular slate.
“People just undervote,” Johnson said.
Rob MacKenna, an Eckerd Corp. computer programmer who is the Democratic challenger to Johnson, strongly disagrees. To address the undervote question, he says, local government must pay for a paper-trail audit system as both a check on the electronic voting system and a boost to voter confidence.
MacKenna’s skepticism about the cause of the undervote stems from the presidential preference primary last March, where a single question was listed on the ballot but where 255 Hillsborough voters, or 0.76 percent of the turnout, had no vote tabulated. Had 255 residents driven to the polls, signed in, walked to the touch screen machine, then decided to abandon the whole idea?
MacKenna refuses to believe it.
The big question is, are we losing people’s votes?" MacKenna said. “That’s what the preliminary data seems to suggest. And that’s the No. 1 thing we can’t have.”
Last month, MacKenna flew to a vendors show in Las Vegas to see audit printers manufactured by Sequoia. The shoe box-sized devices fit on the side of a voting machine and display a roll of audit paper under a fixed pane of glass.
The printer has cash register-style paper, easily visible to the voter, which displays the vote. It also generates a bar code that can be used with an optical scanner for recounts and election audits. Surprisingly, MacKenna said, voters who use machines with printers vote faster, apparently because they readily see their vote result and don’t try to backtrack.
<snip>
But don’t look for the audit printers at the Nov. 2 general election. The printers haven’t been certified by the state of Florida and can’t be ready by election day.
links of interest:
