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Untallied Absentee Ballots Turn Up

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By CHRISTIAN M. WADE

cwade@tampatrib.com

Published: November 13, 2008

TAMPA - Just when you thought the counting was done.

Nearly 850 previously uncounted absentee ballots were pulled Wednesday from inside a vault at the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections office, four days after the county submitted unofficial results from the problem-plagued Nov. 4 election to the state.

Kathy Harris, Election Supervisor Buddy Johnson's chief of staff, said the ballots were dropped off by Tampa voters at the County Government Center on Election Day, but weren't delivered to the supervisor's office on Falkenburg Road until after 7 p.m., when the polls closed.

Because of that, they couldn't be counted until votes from all the precincts were tallied.

"They couldn't be tabulated that night," she said. "So we stored them in the vault."

Harris insisted the ballots were not misplaced or forgotten, and that they were always intended to be counted after the office had sent preliminary totals to the state elections division for certification. Johnson did not return phone messages left Wednesday.

Either way, the find is unlikely to change the outcome of any of the close races, including Johnson's 18,000-vote loss to Phyllis Busansky or County Commissioner Brian Blair's 50,000-vote loss to Kevin Beckner.

However, it's another blemish for Johnson's five-year tenure as the county's election chief.

In the Nov. 4 election, hundreds of voters were only given one page of the two-page ballot, a precinct at the University of South Florida ran out of ballots and problems with computer memory cards overloaded with votes caused counting delays that left several high-profile races in doubt more than 48 hours after polls closed.

Johnson blamed Premier Election Solutions, the Texas-based company that manufactured the county's election machines, for the delays and argued that his staff did nothing wrong. Premier admitted there were problems, but a memo showed they had warned Johnson about overloading the memory cards.

At one point, Rep. Kathy Castor asked the U.S. Justice Department to intervene in the count, citing concerns about the slow counting of ballots and irregularities.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to say if it would get involved.

The additional ballots were counted Wednesday by members of the county's canvassing board and will be submitted to the state by Sunday's deadline to submit the final results. State elections officials were not aware of the uncounted absentee ballots.

The additional absentee ballots were counted Wednesday by two members of the county's vote canvassing board, Johnson and Hillsborough Commissioner Kevin White, who met to recount ballots from the Tampa Palms Community Development District race.

"I'm shocked," Busansky said. "This is the kind of thing we need to prevent in the future."

Busansky takes over for Johnson on Jan. 4.

Reporter Christian M. Wade can be reached at (813) 259-7679

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