BlogWood: MT Archives

Pinellas votes mis-tallied

Pinellas Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark is not having a very good season. She’s already come under fire for losing and miscounting ballots. Now, it turns out that her office sent even more bad numbers to the state than were previously disclosed.

On Election Night last month, the results were clear: Pinellas County voters defeated by more than 17,000 votes an initiative to legalize slot machines in South Florida.

But the official state record says the exact opposite, the result of a clerical error by the office of Pinellas Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark.

The mistake, largely unnoticed until highlighted Thursday by unsuccessful opponents of Amendment 4, would not have changed anything. The slot machine measure passed by more than 119,000 votes statewide.

But in a state whose image is tainted by election problems, the 34,000-vote mistake underscores the fragility of a system that ultimately relies on humans to get it right. It also is another embarrassment for Clark, who never revealed the gaffe publicly.

She already has come under fire three times for mishandling ballots, including misplacing 280 absentee ballots last month until it was too late to count them.

In the closely contested 2000 presidential election, Clark's office neglected to count 1,400 ballots and counted more than 900 ballots twice. In 2001, her office misplaced six absentee ballots in a Tarpon Springs city election.
......

The (latest) mistake occurred when Clark's office sent its final tally of the Nov. 2 election to state officials in Tallahassee.

Preliminary electronic transmissions sent by her office showed Amendment 4 losing by more than 17,000 votes in Pinellas County. But under state law, only the final tally counts. It must be on paper and signed by the three-member county canvassing board.

Steg said she didn't know Thursday which elections staff members created Pinellas' final tally. But the document shows staff transposed the "Yes" and "No" vote tallies.

It apparently went unnoticed by either Clark or the two other canvassing board members, Pinellas County Judge Patrick Caddell and County Commission Chairman Susan Latvala, who signed the flawed form Nov. 12.

You remember Patrick Caddell, right? He’s the one who blithely dismissed previous counting room gaffes:

"Things happen," Caddell said.