Observers say Miami-Dade election supervisors? ouster was a quiet coup

By Mc Nelly Torres    South Florida Sun-Sentinel   June 20 2005

 
When Miami-Dade County Manager George Burgess appointed Lester Sola as the county's new supervisor of elections, it was with little fanfare.

Unlike the arrival of his predecessor, Constance Kaplan, Sola's March 31 appointment largely went unnoticed. Instead, reporters focused on Kaplan's resignation following a county memo that determined a coding error led to hundreds of lost votes during the March 8 slot machine referendum.

The appointment signaled Burgess trusted Sola to restore stability in a department ravaged by scandal in recent years, control a growing budget and decide the fate of the $24.5 million in electronic voting machines.

"He is a strong administrator," Burgess said. "He understands the election process and the county. It was probably the easiest decision I've ever made."

But some county observers have described the move as a bloodless coup cleverly executed by Burgess, who had decided to replace Kaplan with one of his own.

"Although he seems honest and concerned, his knowledge on the issue is not deep enough to run a department," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a longtime critic of the Elections Department, who heads the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. She said the department needs an independent thinker, someone who is not a bureaucrat and is willing to protect voters' rights.

Burgess, who thinks of Sola as "inside talent," was convinced he had the right person for the job, someone who could restore the department's credibility after a few years of scandal, he said.

"He has a passion about the elections process and his vision and goals mirror mine," the county manager said.

Sola, 39, a longtime county employee, has worked for the department since 2002 and was responsible for its day-to-day operations during the transition from the tenure of former supervisor David Leahy to Kaplan. Leahy retired that year after the disastrous gubernatorial primary elections.

The new supervisor said he did not hesitate to accept Burgess' offer.

"It was an honor," Sola said.

Last month Sola recommended that the county scrap the electronic voting system in favor of paper ballots with optical scanners. In a special report, he said that adopting the simpler system could save county taxpayers millions and provide a paper record of every ballot cast.

An outraged Mayor Carlos Alvarez requested a study after the disturbing news on the slot machine referendum. The mayor was upset that the current system, purchased only a few years ago from Elections Systems & Software, has increased the cost of running an election to about $7 million.

Broward County Commissioner Ben Graber has said he would like to see Broward officials, who also purchased iVotronic machines, follow Miami-Dade's lead.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson has said his county uses machines from a different manufacturer than Broward and Miami-Dade and hasn't had the magnitude of problems.

For Sola, taking over a department with 102 full-time employees, about 200 seasonal positions and an annual budget that this year has jumped from $12.7 million to $20 million meant he would inherit a laundry list of problems and challenges.

But he said he is up to the challenge.

"What you do is you surround yourself with knowledgeable people," Sola said, adding that he objects to any characterization of himself as a bureaucrat. He'd rather be known as a public administrator and a compulsive fact checker who has a passion for government and aims to restore the voters' trust in county elections.

"Unfortunately, people make mistakes," Sola said, adding the elections department oversees over 30 elections every year with little trouble. "If they [voters] don't feel that we are not doing the elections correctly and effectively, then we will lose voters' confidence."