Despite problems with vote totals, Indian River County Canvassing Board approves primary election results (FL)

Jim Turner    TCPalm    03 September 2008

VERO BEACH — Indian River County's three-member canvassing board approved the Aug. 26 primary results on Tuesday — but those numbers are absent the more than 5,000 votes that had to be removed from the election night totals due to the ballots in 40 precincts being counted twice.

Next up for the board will be to oversee a new state-mandated audit of its voting equipment on Thursday.

The purpose of the audit is to show that the optical scan machines correctly counted each ballot.

If elections officials hadn't discovered the double-count last week, and if the audit detected the mistake, there may not have been any way to correct the election results because the results were already deemed final by the canvassing board.

And, the hand-count audit would have caught the error because the ballots that will be checked — from the Republican primary for Florida's 15th District in Congress in two precincts — were among those counted twice, said Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem.

The error occurred when an election worker inadvertently shifted test results sent in via a modem line into the primary election totals.

In the November general election "when we do the modem results, we'll have a sheet that runs out for each precinct that shows what the total is," Clem said "We'll go ahead and release unofficial returns as the modem results come in. But before we leave the building that night, we will make sure that (printed results driven to the elections office by precinct clerks) matches the modem returns."

It's the limited sample in the audit that is why the Florida's Voters Coalition is pushing for new guidelines. They group wants more races audited. But if that is done, it could require an amendment to the state Constitution to delay when new legislators are seated.

"We have the paper ballots, that's a great first step, but we need the audit done in a meaningful way so we have confidence in our results," said Pam Haengel, coalition vice president and co-founder.

The coalition, a group behind the successful push to require paper records of all votes in Florida, contends that randomly checking 1 to 2 percent of the results within nine days doesn't provide a large enough sample, nor the time to do a full audit.

Haengel says there's a need to change the state Constitution because the law requires state legislators to be seated nine days after the general election and any improved audit couldn't be completed in that time frame.

The coalition is working with University of Florida statisticians and going county-by-county watching the audits to gather information to support their argument that they will take to state Legislators before the next session. County Court Judge David Morgan County Court Judge Joe Wild County Commissioner Peter O'Bryan