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Ousted Johnson Still Blames Voting Machine Firm

News Channel 8 photo by ERIC HAUSMANN

Buddy Johnson, the outgoing Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections, said the company that manufactured the county's election machines gave unclear instructions.

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By ADAM EMERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 7, 2008

TAMPA - In an interview this morning, ousted Hillsborough County elections supervisor Buddy Johnson insists human error played no part in the delayed count of Tuesday's voting results. Rather, he said, the fault lies with Premier Elections Solutions, the Texas company Johnson handpicked to provide voting machines.

"Premier could have done a better job in explaining what the uploading challenges were," Johnson said from his Falkenburg Road office.

Johnson said the voting machine company assured elections office technicians that as many as 20,000 ballots could be processed from a single machine.

Johnson said an earlier memo sent by Premier warning elections officials to change out a machine's memory card after "a few thousand ballots have been processed" was undefined.

The county's election system came to a halt on Election Night after officials uploaded tens of thousands of ballots from early voting stations while also uploading ballots cast Tuesday.

Democratic leaders said Johnson, a Republican, badly mismanaged the count, with some pointing to Johnson's decision to upload the data from all ballots at once.

Johnson said that is "a deflection" from the real problem: Premier's poor guidance.

"There was no human error," he said.

He also said that changing out memory cards multiple times would have been problematic later if subsequent audits pointed out time gaps in those machines.

Johnson also criticized Democratic leaders for pointing to flaws in his management without calling his office seeking answers.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, for one, wrote Thursday to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey urging him to dispatch federal agents to determine what happened.

In response, Johnson said, "Bring it on."

Reporter Adam Emerson can be reached at (813) 259-8285.

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