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Hunt for missing ballots widens in Palm Beach County   (FL)

Mark Hollis     South Florida Sun-Sentinel     05 September 2008

A hunt will launch at daybreak today for roughly 2,500 missing Palm Beach County ballots from the Aug. 26 primary, the latest turn in an election plagued by counting problems.

The search for ballots will involve what Assistant County Administrator Brad Merriman describes as an armada of county workers, including off-duty firefighters and sheriff's deputies, who will go to voting locations in hopes of finding missing ballots.

Thursday's ballot-counting by three dozen staffers working in pairs inside a warehouse near West Palm Beach resulted in a count of 100,002 ballots. That is 2,521 fewer ballots than the 102,523 ballots county officials say were counted on Election Day.

Early Thursday, election workers said they thought they had found all but about 750 of the missing ballots. But that prediction was based only on a mathematical review of precinct vote totals and not a counting of actual ballots or their containers.

Pending in this historic ballot search is the outcome of at least one race: a close contest between Circuit Judge Richard Wennet and challenger William Abramson. But with new uncertainty about the number of ballots actually cast, candidates in several other races with close vote totals, including those in a contentious state House District 78 seat, began Thursday gearing up for possible legal challenges of the election.

"It's just a very frustrating thing because I think anyone who was within that cone of votes, you've got to wonder, 'Was my individual race affected?' It's just a great quandary," said Steve Nichol, who placed third in the District 78 race. "It just opens up the door for cynicism and people saying, 'I'm not going to participate. Is my vote going to count?'"

Meanwhile, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning delivered county officials some good news Thursday night. He told them by telephone that they now don't have to meet an earlier deadline of tonight for confirming how many people voted in Palm Beach County. On Wednesday, Browning had warned officials in person that the search for ballots and recounting of votes would have to be settled by tonight.

Now, Gov. Charlie Crist and other state officials plan to certify at 9:30 a.m. today all statewide elections results, except for the Wennet-Abramson race in Palm Beach County.

County Commissioner Mary McCarty, a member of the county elections canvassing board that has been overseeing the hunt for ballots, continued to predict Thursday night that the outcome of the judge's race is probably only going to be settled by the courts or in a possible November re-vote.

"My hope and my prediction is that a judge puts it on the November ballot," McCarty told reporters.

McCarty also said the ordeal has shown the need for substantially better training of poll workers, elections officials and voters — some of which, she said, will have to come before the Nov. 4 general election.

"The people should be outraged, and I'm outraged," McCarty said of the missing ballots. "Now we're just doing the best we can to get it right."

Canvassing board members took testimony Thursday night from several county officials and an executive from Sequoia Voting Systems, the maker of the optical scanners used in the election.

Phil Foster, a Sequoia vice president, repeatedly said he thinks the missing ballot dilemma is not a fault of the voting equipment. He also warned that there could be human error in the hand counts of ballots.

With that possibility, elections workers Thursday night, at the request of the canvassing board, began conducting a several-hour machine counting of the ballots. That step is meant to check the accuracy of Thursday's hand count of ballots and will not produce any results of how people actually voted. It's a step that carries some risk, officials warned, because ballots can be damaged in the machine counting process.

Also on Thursday, officials began counting the number of voters who signed in to vote on Election Day.Still to come, possibly this afternoon, is a machine recount of the vote totals in the judge's race. That could be followed by a hand recount.

In their attempts to reconcile the disparity in ballot totals, county officials have now found three ballots that weren't processed and had been inappropriately stuffed in elections paperwork rather than precinct ballot scanners.

Staff Writer Erika Pesantes contributed to this report.



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