By: Dale King
Just when you thought it was OK to confidently cast your election ballot in Palm Beach County, the specter of past voting fiascos is reappearing from the nether world.
It appeared that Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher had the system back on track when, lo and behold, the ballot in Wellington hit a snag. A major league snag. A couple of candidates who won were told they really lost. And a couple of people who lost were told they had won.
All of a sudden, it was November 2000 all over again. Images of Al Gore, Pat Buchanan and George W. Bush appeared in the brains of Palm Beach County voters, especially those who endured the 37 day period nearly 12 years ago when the county held the country hostage as it tried desperately to figure out who had won.
This gave rise to such phrases as the “butterfly ballot,” “hanging chads,” “pregnant chads” and other references to the IBM card on which voter tabulations were recorded.
Then-Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore was immediately placed in the hot seat, and earned an international reputation for creating the butterfly ballot. She spent a sad four more years in office before she was ousted by Arthur Anderson, who had his own troubles with the office before Bucher won the seat in 2008.
I always felt LePore got a really bad rap. Some people tried to lay the entire problem on her. Yes, she concocted the butterfly ballot, but she didn’t cause all the headaches that followed. She didn’t deserve to get death threats, angry emails and other nasty reactions from all over the world.
Besides, I remember her as a very nice person, with a wry sense of humor. But the strain of the job clearly got to her. I interviewed her shortly after she lost her 2004 re-election bid, and in the middle of our talk, she had to step away to cry.
I know what she did wrong and I wish I had talked to her before all this happened. You see, I had seen the punch card ballot before, back in Massachusetts years earlier. But Massachusetts created the ballot so that only one page showed at a time. It did not “butterfly” into a two-page ballot, so there was no confusion.
But it didn’t end there. The punch card ballot was declared illegal soon after the 2000 election. You can actually see one of those systems on display at the Boca Raton Historical Society.
Palm Beach County replaced the punch card with the infamous touch-screen system, which also ruffled the feathers of an already wary electorate. Voters demanded a receipt, pointing out that when they made an ATM transaction, they got a receipt, so why not a vote receipt.
Didn’t happen. Touch screens eventually went the way of the punch cards and the county again had to cough up cash to buy the optical scan ballots, and a system to make them work.
That brings us to today, as we ponder what happened in Wellington. As we said back in 2000, it’s not over. The company that created the voting system has taken the responsibility for a “glitch” in the system. But lawsuits are being filed in Wellington – just like they were filed in Palm Beach County in 2000.
It’s a sorry situation when you have to call in lawyers and judges to make the final decision in elections.
The Bucher debacle has caused at least one person to announce a bid for her seat – Delray Beach Mayor Nelson “Woodie” McDuffie, who has scads of experience with computers as an employee of the Property Appraiser’s Office and before.
Hopefully, the winner of the 2012 election will be able to do what LePore and Anderson and, to date, Bucher, have been unable to do. That is, to restore confidence in the voting system.