Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris
               Problems blamed on machines, but human error rampant

               By John Mintz and Peter Slevin
 
              THE WASHINGTON POST
 
 WASHINGTON, June 1 —  So close was the Nov. 7 presidential election in Florida that state law required an automatic recount the next day. George W. Bush’s lead soon slipped to 327 votes. Republican  field leader James A. Baker III repeatedly urged an end to the  stalemate, asserting that “the vote in Florida has been counted and  the vote in Florida has been recounted.”

‘It was different systems, with different standards, different technology, different expectations and different procedures. That’s a prescription for nonequality of treatment.’ 
— EDWARD T. FOOTE, Co-chair of a task force formed to study the election 

IN FACT, 18 of the state’s 67 counties never recounted the ballots at all. They simply checked their original results. To this day, more than 1.58 million votes have not been counted a second time.
That may be the starkest example of county-to-county disparities  that marred the Florida presidential vote, but it wasn’t the only one in an election sure to be remembered for its chaotic outcome — and by those on the losing side, its questionable legitimacy.
A confounding array of vague laws, arbitrary local decisions and erratic leadership by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s office  resulted in turmoil across the state — from the way voters were treated to how ballots were designed and counted.
For all the focus on faulty voting equipment and errant chads, a review of the election by The Washington Post shows that the trouble in  Florida can be traced less to machines than to people. 

                  •Elections 2000: White House 
                  •Botched purge barred some 
                  •Florida election slide show 
                  •Florida to overhaul system 
                  •Harris' election stance assailed 
Many counties used sophisticated voting equipment designed to catch  ballot errors — but two decided simply to switch off the mechanisms. Eight counties printed Spanish ballots for large blocs of Hispanic voters, but one elections supervisor chose not to do so. In 26 counties, ballots were  disqualified if people voted for a candidate and wrote in the same  candidate’s name on their ballots.
“It was different systems, with different standards, different  technology, different expectations and different procedures,” said Edward  T. Foote II, chancellor of the University of Miami and co-chair of a task  force named by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to study the election. “That’s a prescription for nonequality of treatment.”
Five Supreme Court justices halted the hand recount of Florida ballots on Dec. 12, declaring that standards varied so widely that voters would be denied a “fundamental right” to equal treatment.
The evidence shows that disparate treatment began long before the polls opened on Nov. 7, and continued long afterward.
 
      UNSUPERVISED SUPERVISORS
The secretary of state’s first duty, as specified in Florida’s 122-page voting law, is to “maintain uniformity” in the conduct of  elections. But in a state in which authority to run elections is divided  between Tallahassee and 67 county elections supervisors, that was easier said than done.
The supervisors — all but one of them elected by popular vote — are so famous for their independence that a post-election report by the Florida Senate asserted that some “often intentionally disregard” election laws. The rest of the time, they made individual decisions as they saw fit.
The Florida Division of Elections — which is part of the secretary of state’s office — was often passive in dealing with the supervisors,  according to national voting experts and elections officials in the state. The division did little to correct the disparities in county voting procedures, and at times created problems of its own.
Setting out to cull felons from voting rolls, for example, the elections division delivered to the counties lists of “probable” felons that contained thousands of names of non-felons. Some county supervisors used the lists to expunge voters, but others discarded them. The state did nothing to reconcile the approaches.
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Victoria Wilson told Harris at a public hearing in January that she had “abandoned” the supervisors: “They  wanted help, they wanted money, they wanted guidance and the voters really had to pay the price.”
Harris replied that no supervisors complained to her personally.  She testified that her 39-person staff had no authority to command county officials, that she was not involved in the division’s daily management and knew little about its work.
Making its job more difficult, the elections division had lost nearly half its staff in recent years, leaving behind an unseasoned team that had never conducted a presidential election. “It was like asking someone to play in the Super Bowl,” said Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio, “when they had never played football before.”
Before the November election, according to people who know her, Harris spent virtually no time on electoral matters, instead focusing on the other responsibilities of her office, particularly matters of commerce and international trade. Harris declined to comment for this story. “It does seem weird,” Clay Roberts, director of the Division of Elections, said of Florida’s elections structure. “We have some authority to interpret the statutes, but we have no authority to direct the supervisors how to do their jobs. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that they’re elected constitutional officers, and I should mind my own business.”
 
      ‘IT WAS A DISASTER’
An example of a county official going her own way could be found in Osceola County.Puerto Ricans and new Hispanic citizens have moved by the tens of thousands to Osceola and the rest of central Florida in recent years. Federal law requires ballots to be printed in two languages in any county in which voting-age citizens with English-language deficiencies make up at least 5 percent of the population. Miami-Dade and seven other Florida counties have printed bilingual ballots for years.
But in Osceola, where 29 percent of residents are Hispanic, Elections Supervisor Donna Bryant refused to print ballots in two languages, helping to trigger an inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department. Investigators want to know whether the lack of bilingual ballots and the paucity of Spanish-speaking poll workers interfered with residents’ ability to vote. Bryant said she chose not to print Spanish ballots because of the expense and hassle, and because “we haven’t been ordered by the U.S. Justice Department.” U.S. officials say many counties print ballots in Spanish without federal prompting.

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Armando Rivera, vice chairman of the Osceola Democratic Party, spoke of confusion in heavily Hispanic precincts, where Democratic voters significantly outnumbered Republicans. “It was a disaster,” he said. 
“County officials were ill-prepared and didn’t have enough Hispanic poll  workers.” Rivera said many Spanish-speaking voters complained of uncertainty about the ballot. Dozens of voters, he said, lost their votes when they marked ballots once for Democrat Al Gore and again for Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne, whose name appeared in the slot just below Gore and vice presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman.
Why? Rivera said they confused “Libertarian” and “Lieberman.” Whether it was the Palm Beach butterfly ballot or the “wraparound” ballots that spread the presidential candidates across two columns, voters by the thousands cast votes for two candidates, invalidating their ballots. 

The Florida ballot proved confusing to plenty of English speakers as well. Whether it was the Palm Beach butterfly ballot or the “wraparound” ballots that spread the presidential candidates across two columns, voters by the thousands cast votes for two candidates, invalidating their ballots.
       A complicating factor was the instruction in the presidential section of all Florida ballots to “Vote for Group.” Even elections  officials differ on the meaning of that phrase, disputing whether it meant to vote for a two-member presidential ticket or for Florida’s 25-member slate of presidential electors.
      The origins of the two-column ballots varied, with county supervisors having the final say. Much of the controversy has focused on  Palm Beach, where supervisor Theresa LePore designed the infamous butterfly ballot to accommodate large type for elderly voters. Gore likely lost about 6,500 votes there as a result of voter error or confusion, an analysis by The Post shows.
      Less well-known, however, is the role of the secretary of state’s office in developing a ballot that some voters found to be confusing. Florida law requires the office to dispatch “the format of the ballot” to all 67 supervisors of elections. The wraparound version sent by Harris’s staff featured the 10-candidate presidential race stretched across two columns.
     The Houston-based printer for at least a dozen counties used the state sample as a model. Vice President Bill Stotesbery of Hart InterCivic said the firm’s designers tried “to get it as close as possible to the sample ballot.”
      Voter error was unusually high in a number of the counties that used the wraparound ballot. Studies show that a disproportionate number of  voters mistakenly voted for two candidates, one from each column.
 
      SOFTWARE GLITCH
One of the greatest frustrations for voters on Election Day was being told by poll workers that they were not registered. A significant culprit was the haphazard operation of the state’s motor-voter laws, designed to allow citizens to register when they obtained or renewed driver’s licenses.
      Since 1995, Florida’s motor vehicles agency has processed 570,000 new voter registration forms a year. Balky computer software created numerous errors on application forms, according to state officials. Attention to detail varied widely. Staffers sometimes failed to complete the forms. In the Tampa area, certain motor vehicle offices did not obtain required voter signatures on 1 of every 15 forms. Other prospective voters may not have realized that a separate application was required.
      In countless cases last year, elections supervisors said, the agency failed to deliver new voter information to the counties in time for the election.
      “We never got the forms. Under the law, they’re not registered to vote,” Leon County supervisor Ion Sancho said. “It was not a good experience.”
 
      GETTING A SECOND CHANCE
When Florida voters went to the polls Nov. 7, they encountered four voting systems. Forty-one counties used optical-scan machines, which electronically read ovals colored in by voters. Another 24 counties used punch cards. One used lever machines and another used paper ballots common in the 1800s.
     The 1960s-era punch-card machines, now infamous for their hanging and pregnant chads, were widely panned for causing mistakes. But it turns out that the more modern optical-scan systems — soon to be installed in more Florida counties — had problems of their own.
    “Optical-scan ballot design offers voters so many opportunities to vote improperly that they are limited only by their own imaginations,” the Florida Senate said in its March report. Thousands of ballots went uncounted, for example, when voters erred by making a circle or a check  mark next to the candidate’s name, or used their own pens with the wrong color ink.
     In some precincts with optical-scan ballots, those who voted twice in the same race were rescued by machines programmed to reject such ballots and give voters a second chance. But not all counties with such ballots possessed the equipment, and not all counties with the equipment used it on Election Day.
    Escambia and Manatee counties possessed the second-chance capability but deactivated it. Escambia Supervisor Bonnie Jones said, “People should be able to mark their vote correctly.” She said giving voters a chance to correct mistakes “increases the cost of an election,” because ballots cost 25 cents apiece. “Maybe that was a bad judgment call,” Jones mused. “Who’s to say?”
    The state provided no guidelines, Roberts said. “The statutes were silent on the issue.”
In the 24 optical-scan counties that gave voters a second chance, only one ballot in 167 was invalidated — .6 percent. In the 15 counties in which the technology did not exist, one ballot in 17 was rejected — 5.7 percent.
    The 24 punch-card counties, all of which lacked the second-chance capability, had a rejection rate of 1 in 25 — 3.9 percent. As many as 120,000 Florida ballots could have been corrected by voters if  every county had employed modern machines with second-chance technology. 

      SEEING DOUBLE
Suppose a voter filled in the oval — or punched a hole — beside a candidate’s name, and also wrote in the candidate’s name on the same ballot. Does the vote count?
Twenty-six counties did not count the ballots, most because their machines automatically invalidated them. In seven of these counties, elections officers decided that the voter had cast a ballot improperly.
      In Lake County, where the double-voted ballots were rejected, Supervisor Emogene Stegall defended the decision by saying of voters: “The only thing I know is they failed to read instructions.” Okeechobee County Supervisor Gwen Chandler said, “I did not want to get into subjective calling.”
      Elections officers in 34 counties, however, studied such ballots on Election Day and counted them in the final totals, concluding that the voter’s intent was clear. Pinellas Supervisor Deborah Clark said: “Duh! If it’s the same person, it’s a no-brainer.”
      Indeed, elections officials routinely made judgments about voter intent at several stages in the election process. Canvassers performed these evaluations in varied circumstances, some involving regular ballots, some involving absentees. Elections officers in some optical-scan counties, for example, judged ballots as valid even when voters simply checked or circled a candidate’s name.
 
      A LACK OF DIRECTION
When George W. Bush’s narrow lead triggered the immediate statewide recount on Nov. 8, Harris and the elections staff did not make clear what county supervisors should do. “That was one point in the process where the division needed to step in and say, ‘This is what should be done,’ ” said Iorio, the Hillsborough elections supervisor who also leads the state association of elections chiefs.
Florida election code requires a recount when the margin between candidates is less than .5 percent, but some supervisors felt the statute was unclear. Instead of recounting, officials in the 18 counties simply checked the counting mechanisms on their voting machines to determine whether the numbers matched the official Nov. 7 results.
      Two years earlier, the issue seemed settled. In April 1999, Division of Elections Director Ethel Baxter wrote Manatee County Elections Supervisor Bob Sweat in simple terms: “It is our opinion that ‘recount’ means to count again.” Baxter’s letter was not binding in other counties, and thus supervisors felt free to ignore her opinion. Nor did Harris or Roberts take steps to ensure uniform procedures. Asked why the elections office took no steps to ensure uniform procedures, Roberts said that supervisors knew state officials believed recounts should be performed. He cited the 1999 opinion and a discussion at a conference of supervisors last summer.Sweat, at least, conducted a recount, running all of Manatee’s 111,676 ballots through machines on Nov. 8. Gore gained four votes.
 
      OVERLOOKING THE DEADLINE
Matthew Hendrickson, a sailor aboard the cruiser USS Ticonderoga, mailed his overseas absentee ballot from Puerto Rico on Nov. 13, six days after the Election Day deadline. He knew the presidential race was undecided and he wanted Bush to win. Records show that Duval County included his vote in its results.
      “I dropped it off at the mailbox,” Hendrickson said in an interview. “I was just seeing if it would count or not.” At the time of the election, Florida law was explicit: To count, a ballot must be dated and postmarked by Election Day. It must be witnessed by another person, and the voter must have formally requested the ballot. Some counties, including Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, followed the law to the letter, while others tallied ballots that lacked postmarks or failed to meet other requirements. This was particularly true in north Florida, home to several large military bases, where officials responded  to GOP arguments that military ballots often aren’t postmarked, mailed or delivered on time.
      At least 17 ballots examined by The Post in four north Florida counties were counted despite bearing postmarks dated after Nov. 7. Scores more were counted after arriving without postmarks in elections offices between Nov. 8 and Nov. 17, the deadline for overseas absentee ballots to be received. Election watchers note there is no way to know when ballots without postmarks were completed.
      When elections officers opened the envelopes on Nov. 17, lawyers for George W. Bush said it was unfair to enforce the technicalities of state law against America’s fighting men and women. Under pressure, Democrats decided not to challenge ballots that lacked required features. The result was a rout of the Democrats in the northern counties, where Bush picked up 176 votes that lacked postmarks and other required features.
      Elsewhere, county canvassing boards saw things the opposite way. In overwhelmingly Democratic Broward County, elections officials rejected 304 overseas ballots for various technical reasons, including 119 because they lacked postmarks, Democrats said. Miami-Dade invalidated about 200; Volusia threw out 43 and Orange 117. All three counties voted Democratic. In Democratic counties, Bush’s forces demanded that officials follow the state’s strict rules.
       After counties reached their conflicting decisions, U.S. District Judge Lacey A. Collier ruled on Dec. 8 that officials in several  jurisdictions must count ballots even if they lacked foreign postmarks or  if the voter had not formally requested an absentee ballot.
       In two Florida counties, contrary to standards of fairness, elections officials knew absentee voters’ party affiliations before deciding whether their ballots would count.
      How? Codes on the pre-printed mailing labels in Manatee and Okaloosa counties showed party registrations. At no point did state officials try to bring order to the chaos.  “We do not,” said Roberts, “have authority to tell county supervisors to do anything.”
 
      THE LEGISLATURE ACTS
To fix the problems with the election, the Florida Legislature passed a law last month streamlining and unifying aspects of the process. On votes of 120 to 0 in the House and 38 to 2 in the Senate, the legislature ordered that punch-card ballots be replaced by optical-scan equipment that allows voters to correct their mistakes. Recount rules will be standardized statewide. Ballots will share a logical design and will be overseen by the state.
      Roberts foresees a busy summer as he and his staff formulate new regulations to corral the 67 supervisors and help make Florida elections more nearly uniform. Ruminating on the discordant system that produced the remarkable November 2000 election, he said, “It’s an odd way to run a government.”
 
    Staff writer Dan Keating and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report. 
 
                                           © 2001 The Washington Post Company

TAMPA, May 31 — Kelvin King was turned away from the polls here in November when records showed that he was ineligible to vote as a convicted felon. County election officials learned days later that King’s civil rights had been restored eight months earlier.

SANDYLYNN WILLIAMS had voted in every election since she was 18. But this time, election officials confused her with her sister — a felon who had once used Williams’s name — and refused to let her vote.
       “They sent me a letter of apology, and I just laughed,” recalled Williams, 34, who said she had planned to vote for Democratic nominee Al Gore. “I was cheated out of voting.”

       The Tampa residents were among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-felons in Florida who civil rights lawyers contend were wrongly prevented from voting in the Nov. 7 election after state election officials and a private contractor bungled an attempt to cleanse felons from voter rolls.

                                                     RIDDLED WITH ERRORS
       The effort was so riddled with errors that a more precise tally will probably never be possible. But it is clear that at least 2,000 felons whose voting rights had been automatically restored in other states were kept off the rolls and, in many cases, denied the right to vote. 
       At the same time, some felons who should not have been allowed to vote slipped through and cast ballots.
       Although the troubles with Florida’s election procedures have been widely reported, the full breadth of the flaws in the state’s system has emerged only over time. Florida’s many problems, according to state and national inquiries and a review by The Washington Post, include unreliable voting machines, improper counting of absentee ballots and arbitrary and conflicting decisions by county election officials, to name a few.
       Still underway is an examination of approximately 170,000 Florida ballots rejected by counting machines in November. The project, conducted by a consortium of news organizations that includes The Post, is designed to learn how so many potential votes went uncounted.

                                               DISPROPORTIONATE IMPACT
       Six months removed from the charged post-election recounts, it is also clear, in the words of a state task force that reviewed the election, that many of the difficulties were “most serious in precincts with large numbers of elderly, low-income, immigrant, minority or inexperienced voters.”
       The impact of the botched felon purge fell disproportionately on black Floridians and, by extension, on the Democratic Party, which won the votes of 9 out of every 10 African American voters, according to exit polls. 
No one has proven intent to disenfranchise any group of voters, but the snafus have fueled a widespread perception among blacks that an effort was made to dilute their voting power in an election that George W. Bush won by 537 votes — a victory margin of 0.00009 of the 5.9 million votes counted.
       A Washington Post poll, conducted in conjunction with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, shows that nearly half of all blacks believe problems with voting machines and ballots fell disproportionately on minority voters; 85 percent of those respondents believe there was a deliberate attempt to reduce their political power.
       The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which is probing the Florida election, in March called the felon purge and other Election Day problems “disturbing” and said the evidence “may ultimately support findings of prohibited discrimination.” A final report from the commission is due for release early next month.
       Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who oversees state elections, maintain that problems encountered by voters were unintentional.
       “After three days of hearings involving over 100 witnesses, the Civil Rights Commission has yet to be presented with any evidence of intentional discrimination in the conduct of the November 7, 2000, election in Florida,” Bush said in a statement responding to the commission’s criticisms. “I take seriously the alleged inefficiencies and bureaucratic errors identified in the commission’s statement.”

                                                   ‘THERE WERE BARRIERS’
        Outrage over the felon purge and other Election Day lapses spoiled for many blacks a major political success. Statewide, black turnout jumped 65 percent over 1996’s, partly as a backlash to a Jeb Bush plan that ended affirmative action in university admissions and state contracts.
       Blacks account for 13 percent of Florida’s voting population but cast 15 percent of the 5.9 million votes for president, up from 10 percent in 1996, according to exit polls.
       Vivian Heyward, who helped register friends and neighbors in Tampa as part of a get-out-the vote effort by the NAACP, can’t get last fall’s election off her mind. The NAACP and five other civil rights organizations have filed a lawsuit alleging that blacks were disproportionately affected by the election problems.
       “That was one of the worst things that ever happened in this city. . . . A lot of people are saying, ‘I’m never going to vote again,’ ” Heyward said. “Hopefully, we haven’t lost them.”
       Black neighborhoods lost many more presidential votes than other areas because of outmoded voting machines and confusion about ballots. And on Election Day, complaints began rolling in across the state from registered voters whose names were not on precinct voting lists.
       But poll workers could not get through to county election offices to verify voters’ status, and many voters said they were forced to leave for work before they could cast ballots.
       “They weren’t expecting as many voters in those places as came,” said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. He advised the NAACP to focus on turnout rather than registration last fall.
       Pam Iorio, the election supervisor in Hillsborough County, said a 50-person phone bank she added on Election Day was not enough. “When you have 6 million people who all do one thing at the same time, get a driver’s license, go to a ballgame, you’re going to have problems,” Iorio said.
       But Fred Galey, election supervisor in Brevard County, southeast of Orlando, said many voters were looking for something to “bitch about.”
       “Some people had to take an extra two or three minutes,” he said. “Those that got impatient and left did not want to vote. People sit in line for 20 minutes at Burger King or McDonald’s. If they go to the polling place and have to wait too long, they complain they were denied the right to vote.”
         But Mary Frances Berry, chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said testimony at hearings gives credibility to the complaints.
       “We know there were barriers to people voting,” Berry said. “What we don’t know is whether those barriers were the result of discrimination or knuckleheadedness.”
                                                     ‘WE WARNED THEM’
        Clearly, however, one of the major impediments to black voting was the purge of the voter rolls. Florida has one of the nation’s strictest laws governing restoration of felons’ voting rights. Thirty-one percent of the state’s black men are barred from voting because of prior felonies.
       The voter purge was mandated after the 1997 Miami mayoral race was overturned because votes were cast by felons and non-residents. Legislators ordered everyone off the voting rolls who did not belong. In the end, that proved to be tens of thousands of “probable felons.” The purge of the voter rolls was previously described by several Florida newspapers and the Nation magazine.
       The state mandated the hiring of an outside vendor for $4 million to compile a list of voters who had committed felonies in other states. Database Technologies (now ChoicePoint Inc.), creator of an Internet service widely used by law enforcement agencies for investigative purposes, was chosen to sort through state and national databases to identify felons.
       From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified. Florida does not regularly record Social Security numbers in its records, so its felons were identified by name and date of birth, including close but not exact matches.
       That’s how the state intended the plan to work.
       “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the [county elections] supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether,” said Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, who headed the state purge effort, in a March 1999 e-mail to Database Technologies product manager Marlene Thorogood, who had warned him of possible mistakes.
       In an interview, Clay Roberts, director of the state’s division of elections, confirmed the policy. “The decision was made to do the match in such a way as not to be terribly strict on the name.”
                                                         ‘A LIABILITY ISSUE’
       In-house concerns persisted. “Let’s remember there is a liability issue in our erroneously identifying individuals as felons or deceased,” said George A. Bruder Jr., a company senior vice president, in a May 26, 2000, e-mail to Thorogood. “We need to be very careful in who we label as what. If we are unsure the default should be to NOT label them as anything.”
       The company admits it made some mistakes. One list sent to Florida officials inaccurately contained 8,000 people who had committed misdemeanors — not felonies — in Texas.
       People wrongly tagged as felons because of the loose matching policy included judges and the father of a county election supervisor. Also on the list were at least 2,000 felons who moved to Florida from states that automatically restore voting rights.
       It was left to local election supervisors to determine whether residents of their counties were accurately listed as felons. With little guidance from the state, county supervisors devised their own rules.
       Many counties sent certified letters notifying residents that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had listed them as felons. People who did not respond were removed from voting rolls — a practice criticized by the civil rights groups that filed the lawsuit.
       In places like Escambia County, voters on the list were required to prove to election officials that they were not felons. In Lake County, by contrast, Supervisor Emogene Stegall decided the list of “probable felons” sent by the state was so flawed that she did not use it.
       “They’re not sending us what the statute requires them to do, so I feel we’re not bound to process those,” Stegall said. “They’re not sure. There are so many people who have the same name, same date of birth.”
       The list did catch many felons who had voted illegally in previous elections. One was Jeffrey Key of Tampa, who served more than three years on a 1989 armed robbery charge and resumed voting in 1992 without applying to have his rights restored. In 2000, he was turned away from the polls.
       “They didn’t inform me I had to do any of this,” said Key, referring to prison officials. “By voting in 1992 and 1996, I thought everything was fine with me.”
       Many Florida legislators have criticized Database Technologies for accepting $4 million for what they consider shoddy work. But company officials insist the state caused the problem.
       “We warned them,” said James E. Lee, vice president of communications for the company. The list “was exactly what the state wanted. They said, ‘The counties will verify the information, so you don’t have to.’”
                         Staff writers John Mintz and Peter Slevin contributed to this report. 
       
                                            © 2001 The Washington Post Company