TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Will The Ballots Ever Add Up In Hillsborough?

ADVERTISEMENT

By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: November 7, 2008

Hillsborough County voters must be getting used to something new every time they show up to cast their ballots. For some reason the people in charge of elections around here have found it necessary almost every voting cycle to go out and spend a few million dollars or so to install voting machines that can guarantee that when you cast a ballot, it will be counted and they can go back and check it out.

So far, they haven't succeeded.

Under the stirring leadership of Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson - who was up for re-election and whose name and photo you must have seen in the tons of literature his office put out, all in the name of voter education - Hillsborough attempted to join the nation this week in holding an election.

The No.-2-Pencil Days

This time around we went with some kind of optical scanning process that required voters to fill in little circles, sort of like you used to do with those No. 2 pencils when you were taking standardized tests back in school. Remember how the teacher would always warn you not to draw outside the circle or it would mess up the whole test?

For the most part it worked, unless you are the 70,000 or so whose votes they were still sorting on Thursday. Apparently there were some problems at two voting precincts, and with the early votes being counted and with the absentee votes as well as some provisional ballots.

When you look at the history of voting in Hillsborough you have to ask yourself questions, especially as we turn the process over to techno-geeks instead of the backroom boys, where you could at least be sure your vote was counted, sometimes two or three times.

It didn't help that the closest race still in question was Buddy's own race against Phyllis Busansky, which Buddy finally conceded Thursday night.

We have come a long way technologywise. I mean, I was watching the election results on CNN and they had one reporter standing there next to Wolf Blitzer, except it wasn't really her but a hologram achieved by using dozens of cameras.

But the technology that got us to the moon almost 40 years ago and gives us credit card-size computer phone systems can't seem to get us through an election, at least around here.

On Wednesday, after it was obvious somebody had gummed things up, Premier Election Solutions, the outfit Johnson purchased the machines from, sent out a long memo.

Does Anybody Speak Geekian?

Here's just one paragraph: "All Hillsborough absentee ballots were successfully scanned and uploaded to the election management server. However, 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."

Got that? I worked my way through the first sentence before they began writing in Esperanto, or some strange Geekian language.

There has to be a way to simplify this process. Maybe we could do what the Iraqis did and have everyone stick a finger in purple dye after voting. Right now I would settle for dumping a vat of that purple stuff on Buddy and wish him well in his new career as a farmer.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT