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Election count errors under review  (FL)

Mark Hollis     South Florida Sun-Sentinel     03 September 2008

Palm Beach County officials are struggling to clear up confusion about another local election, and this time it involves the first widespread use of new optical-scan voting machines.

Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson doesn't have answers to what went wrong in last week's election concerning a hotly contested judicial race, according to his top aides.

"He has everybody investigating it," Kathy Adams, a spokeswoman for Anderson, said Tuesday. "No stone is being left unturned to find out what the reason is for this."

At issue is the race between Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Richard Wennet and his challenger William Abramson.

At about 1 a.m. Sunday, a two-day recount of ballots ended with Wennet beating Abramson by 60 votes. But officials are struggling to determine why the recount produced results for 87,800 votes when election night results showed 90,700 votes were cast.

Abramson has said he may file a lawsuit challenging the results.

Meanwhile, the state Division of Elections postponed a meeting originally scheduled for today to finalize the elections results.

A machine recount of all the ballots cast in the race took place over the weekend, then a separate hand recount of roughly 11,000 ballots that were kicked out by vote-counting machines as either "undervotes" and "overvotes." Undervotes involve ballots in which it appears voters failed to vote in the race, while overvotes are ballots in which a voter marks more than one candidate.

As for the disparity of roughly 2,900 votes on election night and what was recounted, Adams said the elections office is conducting a thorough review.

"Everybody is on it, and Tallahassee is aware of it," Adams said.

State elections officials are monitoring the situation, but the burden of determining what happened rests mainly on Anderson.

His staff is making sure there were no ballots left in any of the lock boxes at a county vote-tabulation center near West Palm Beach, and discussing various possibilities with the manufacturer of the optical scan.



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