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County's Vote Tally To Go Optical

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By CARL ORTH, The Suncoast News

Published: October 15, 2007

PORT RICHEY - The future of Pasco County elections arrived this month with the shipment of 175 optical scanners for tallying paper ballots.

The first test will come during city elections in April, Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley said. They will be used countywide in the Aug. 26 primary.

Choosing candidates will be a matter of filling in ovals on paper, then having the optical scanner read the marks and create a paper trail.

The Jan. 29 presidential primary will be the last time touch-screen voting is used, Corley said.

That wouldn't be a good time to launch the optical scanners, Corley decided, because he couldn't have arranged to get 1,000 additional privacy booths and other equipment in time for the January vote.

Also during the Jan. 29 election, poll workers will roll out an electronic registration system.

Under the new system, poll workers will no longer consult a computer printout to confirm someone is a registered voter. Instead, voters will swipe their driver's license and a machine will read the identification information encoded in the magnetic stripe on the back and compare it with electronic registration records.

For voters without a driver's license, the Electronic Voter ID Device can search for a name and date of birth. It might take as little as 10 seconds for voters to check in using EVID, Corley said. Pasco is one of 12 Florida counties using the system.

'It's extremely secure,' he said. 'You cannot physically vote in one precinct and then another in five minutes.'

EVID will raise a red flag in such a situation.

The state mandated the switch to optical scanning because of concerns over security and accuracy of the touch-screen technology.

Outcry Began With Contested Race

Things came to a head in November in the bitterly contested 13th Congressional District race. Republican Vern Buchanan was declared the winner by 369 votes over Democrat Christine Jennings after two recounts and a state audit found no problems.

The Jennings camp claimed touch-screen machines in Sarasota County failed to register up to 18,000 votes.

Many of those who defend the results suggest there were so many 'undervotes' because people were turned off by a campaign in which both sides hurled accusations of unethical behavior.

'They are adamant it was just voter disgust' over the mudslinging, Corley said.

Since Corley was appointed elections chief in January, Florida's presidential primary has moved from March to Jan. 29.

'Then the governor came out with the plan to completely overhaul our voting system,' he said.

Plus, the 2008 primary for county and state elections was moved to Aug. 26.

On top of that, Corley has to campaign to keep his job after filling the remainder of Kurt Browning's term.

'It is an absolute terrifying time, yet I wouldn't want to be anywhere else,' Corley said.

'If I seem a little animated, it's not the three cups of coffee I just wolfed down. It's the adrenaline rush of being the supervisor of elections,' he told West Pasco Chamber of Commerce members at a recent breakfast.

'Remember the days of the pregnant chads, the hanging chads and all the chads?' Corley asked, referring to the legal battles that erupted over punch card ballots in the 2000 presidential election.

'The idea is, we want to get Florida out of the butt of jokes. We've heard them all. It gets real old after a while.'

Cuts Take Toll On Elections Office

Corley also has weathered a 'brutal, brutal budget cycle' that began with a call from Michael Nurrenbrock, county management and budget director, in the spring. Because of state-mandated property tax reforms, Nurrenbrock asked Corley to keep his office's 2007-08 budget proposal from exceeding the 2006-07 spending plan.

'After I stopped laughing for 25 minutes, I picked the phone back up,' Corley said, noting the office was dealing with changes in voting systems and the upcoming primaries.

Still, his office managed to save $313,000. Privacy booths from the touch-screen gear will be reused instead of buying new ones for the optical-scan system. And he picked up a used machine from Sarasota County to help with recounts.

Like those 2000 'butterfly ballot' recounts, canvassing boards could end up struggling to determine voter intent in future elections, Corley said. For instance, a voter could mistakenly circle the oval for the chosen candidate and X-out the challengers' ovals.

'There is no perfect system,' he said.

The irony is, disabled voters still will use the touch-screen machines, Corley said, and there will be no paper trail for those ballots.

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