The Political Whore

In 25 years in politics and journalism I have never seen such a surreal scene as the “counting” of votes going on at the Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Office Wednesday. I visited the elections counting office out on Faulkenberg Road in Brandon late in the afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the close of the polls and tens of thousands of votes away from having final results in Hillsborough’s elections, including the close race between incumbent Buddy Johnson and challenger Phyllis Busansky.

The veteran reporters there were just shaking their heads as the hours dragged on, watching through panes of glass as elections workers carefully took absentee ballots out of large envelopes and fed them through a counting machine. This happened only intermittently. Meanwhile, there was no Johnson, the elected supervisor, or his chief PR flak in sight. Johnson had not been seen since the night before. The situation was so exempt of information, the elections office so weird and unresponsive, that one TV reporter remarked loudly that the supervisor’s PIO’s (public information officers) were horrible — as one of them sat in the room silently against a wall.

It is a bad thing not to have a vote tallied before midnight of Election Day. It is unusual — but not unheard of — for vote counting to go on until the wee hours of the morning after. You start to get into a real historic moment when you drag the counting on into the daylight of Wednesday.

To have more than 80,000 votes uncounted by the end of Wednesday and pushed into Thursday is a total meltdown of the system and incompetency on a level that we’ve haven’t seen around these parts in a while, at least at the Supervisors of Elections offices.

With that as a background, at about 5:30 p.m. one of Johnson’s PIO’s came out with two pieces of papers, declaring she had new numbers and a statement from Premier, the software/voting machine company that Johnson finally threw under the bus last night as the cause of the delays. Only problem is that the one news release was not “new numbers” in terms of election results; it was the number of votes that remained to be counted.

The media grumbled.

But here’s the best thing about the news release (and I use that term loosely): Johnson believes that things are going well. “The Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Office is pleased by the overall success of this very large and historic election. Our county is one of the four largest counties in Florida with 383 precincts. While minor challenges are a normal aspect of all large elections our team worked quickly to resolve all issues.”

WTF?

By the same theory of spin, the Bush Administration is pleased by the overall success of the very large and historic invasion of Iraq. And the overall success of the very large and historic credit crisis. And Dick Cheney.

Let’s examine Johnson’s claim and comparison with other large Florida counties. Broward County, with 786 precincts, is all counted. Miami-Dade, with 765 precincts, is all counted. (They even have a webcam you can watch from the counting room.) Orange County, with 262 precincts, is all counted. Pinellas, with 376 precincts, is all counted. Duval County, with 284 precincts, is all counted.

Hillsborough is not. Won’t be until sometime Thursday. At best.

How bad were things? There were two scanning machines at each early voting location where ballots were fed into the scanner and votes were recorded. On Election Night, Johnson’s office found that 60 percent of those machines could not be accessed digitally to download those results. That’s 13 machines that now sit in a corner of the elections counting room. Johnson’s office describes the problem this way: “Due to technical difficulties with Premier Election Solution’s optical scan voting systems at designated remote modem sites, final results were unable to be posted in a timely fashion.” The vendor, Premier, put it this way: “Following the conclusion of voting and polls closing last night, an issue occurred involving upload of results from memory cards to the election management server. This issue delayed final tabulation of votes cast early, as well as those cast in precincts yesterday. Premier has determined that a timeout parameter may cause the modem transmission of results to be prematurely terminated before upload is complete. In addition, the very large amount of voted data on some of the early voting memory cards caused a timed out condition to occur as well.”

That clears things up, huh?

Premier concludes, “We share the Hillsborough County election office’s frustration during this hectic time.”

Epilogue: There are 203,845 Hillsborough residents (so far, at least) who voted to keep Johnson as the county’s supervisor of elections. He leads Busansky by nearly 5,000 votes.

(Full disclosure: In my career in political consulting in the 1990s, I worked for Phyllis Busansky when she was the state director of the welfare-to-work program under Gov. Jeb Bush. I avoided talking with her during her campaign against Buddy Johnson and, in fact, the first conversation we had was last night when I ran into her while covering Kevin Beckner’s election night party in Ybor City.)

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