TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Hillsborough Finds Uncounted Ballots

ADVERTISEMENT

By CHRISTIAN M. WADE

cwade@tampatrib.com

Published: January 17, 2009

Updated: 01/17/2009 12:56 am

TAMPA - In a bizarre postscript to the problem-plagued Nov. 4 election, Hillsborough County officials said Friday they have discovered 440 uncounted ballots more than two months after the official results were submitted to the state for certification.

Newly elected Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Phyllis Busansky said the ballots, found Thursday by warehouse workers at the supervisor's Falkenburg Road offices, were from two Temple Terrace precincts that had voting machine problems.

"I was totally shocked," she said Friday. "This is very serious."

Busansky, who last week succeeded Buddy Johnson, said the ballots are from precincts 626 and 651, both of which vote in Temple Terrace Presbyterian Church.

The discovery is unlikely to change the outcome of any state and county races, but it throws into question the results of the Temple Terrace City Council election, where four candidates competed for two open seats. The second- and third-highest vote-getters were separated by about 80 votes.

Still, because the election results have been certified, the votes probably will go uncounted.

"Unless one of the candidates decides to file a lawsuit," Busansky said.

Johnson did not return a phone call Friday seeking comment.

Busansky said she thinks the uncounted ballots were the result of a combination of human and mechanical error at the Temple Terrace precincts on election night, when two of the three optical scan voting machines in the church apparently broke down.

Elections workers "were unable to get any information out of the machines to find out how many votes had been tabulated at the precincts," said Busansky's chief of staff, Craig Latimer.

The optical scan voting system uses paper ballots, so even if the machines fail there is a paper trail. That's one of the benefits of the state-mandated switch to paper-trail voting in 2007 after a disputed congressional race.

Without the paper ballots as a backup, election officials said, the 440 votes would have been lost forever.

"If a judge orders us to recount the votes, we still have the paper ballots," Latimer said.

David Penoyer, who lost by 84 votes to Mary Jane Neale in the Temple Terrace election, said Friday he is leaning toward legal action to get all the votes counted.

Neale said she hopes the controversy does not end up in a courtroom.

"If I were in David's position, I'd handle it like Al Gore did," she said. "I'd move on."

The uncounted ballots account for about 18 percent of the 2,414 votes cast in both precincts. Because it is impossible to determine which of the 2,414 votes were not counted, people who cast ballots in those precincts will never know whether their votes were counted.

"There's no way to link those votes to a person," Latimer said.

That bothered Patrick Finelli of Temple Terrace, who voted at the church.

Johnson "may have been more concerned about his own chances for victory than he was about fulfilling his duties to the people of our precinct," he said.

Thursday marked the second instance of uncounted ballots being discovered in Hillsborough County after Nov. 4.

About 850 uncounted absentee ballots were pulled from a vault at the Falkenburg offices on Nov. 12, four days after the county submitted unofficial results to the state. At the time, Kathy Harris, Johnson's chief of staff, insisted the ballots were not misplaced or forgotten, saying the office always intended to count them.

Those ballots were tallied under the supervision of the county's three-member canvassing board. The count did not affect any contested races. The tally was done in time to make those votes part of the official results.

Johnson, who was appointed to the office in 2003 by then-Gov. Jeb Bush, is under scrutiny by county officials for cost overruns and other problems during his tenure. November's presidential election dragged on for days in Hillsborough County because of a litany of problems downloading votes from the newly installed optical scan machines.

When she took over as supervisor on Jan. 6, Busansky said, she found the main office on Falkenburg Road in disarray, with piles of financial records stuffed in cardboard boxes on the floor and documents stacked and bound with rubber bands.

Busansky said the elections office has inspected the rest of the ballot boxes and did not find additional uncounted ballots. The ballots found Thursday will remain locked in a vault at the Falkenburg Road site until legal action is filed or the statue of limitations runs out.

She is planning an overhaul of the elections office to ensure it doesn't happen again.

"In the future, voters need to know that their votes are going to be counted," she said.

Reporter Joyce McKenzie and News Channel 8 Reporter Krista Klaus contributed to this report. Reporter Christian M. Wade can be reached at (813) 259-7679.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT