Election errors lead to changes - Pinellas County Florida

[soup]

Pinellas' Deborah Clark announces improvements in the wake of three errors connected to Nov. 2.

By MICHAEL SANDLER, Times Staff Writer
Published December 7, 2004

LARGO - Plagued by more embarrassing mistakes, Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark is punishing staff members, amending internal control procedures and vowing to provide more employee training.

Clark said Monday she is adding new checks and balances that could have prevented three errors that occurred within days of the Nov. 2 election. She also said disciplinary measures are pending for six employees. None serves in supervisory roles, and Clark declined to name the employees.

"I am accountable for everything that happens in this office," Clark said during a news conference Monday at her office. "It's my responsibility to have people on staff who will do a good job, people I can trust to complete the job. That's exactly what I'm going to do."
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/12/07/Tampabay/Election_errors_lead_.shtml

[Quakerfriend]

1. Sounds like she's getting a bit nervous

Way too many things have "happened" in her office going back to 2000- misplaced ballots, wet ballots found in back closet etc, etc.

[fasttense]

2. And this is suppose to make the voters feel better?

Don't worry, I'll take care of the problem. You just sit there and ignore any possible fraud and next year we will make sure you wont even have to be there to hand the election over. And if you don't complain like good little US citizens, we wont even worry about the fact that the vote count might have been a little bit wrong.

[soup]

3. wouldn't have changed the outcome, anyway.

Don't ya just hate that? :grr:

Well, Ms. Clark, this time it did. You certified the wrong results, and the only reason, as far as I can see, that it can be changed to reflect the actual will of the voters is because it was a County issue, not a Statewide one.

and as I wrote that, I thought, ok. The law says the state certified results cannot be changed, but they can be at the county level? How odd is that?

Oh, and that little 280 vote incident? It wasn't one, but THREE separate instances of 'found' votes.

---

LARGO - Pinellas election officials said Thursday they had found 12 more uncounted ballots as they dug through boxes in their office this week.

Two uncounted absentee ballots were sitting unopened in a box that was headed to the warehouse for storage. And 10 provisional ballots were sitting in a blue pouch in a loading dock area. No one had noticed they had not been counted.

The discovery of those 12 on Wednesday came two days after an employee found a box with 268 uncounted absentee ballots. The unmarked brown banker's box was sitting in plain sight on an office floor, with papers and other boxes stacked on top of it.
>snip<

Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said she was unaware of the problem because she didn't know that her staff had not performed a standard check to make sure all ballots were accounted for.
>snip<

"I plan to call each voter personally and apologize," Clark said.
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/19/Tampabay/More_missing_ballots_.shtml

Apologies. Yeah, that'll do it.

[lostnfound]

4. "call each voter"..

when I first read that, for a SPLIT second I thought, "my God, that's a LOT of phone calls...there's almost a million people in Pinellas County"..

What this stupid woman doesn't recognize is that disenfranchising 300 (depending on the election) potentially disenfranchises 50 million.. She owes calls to ALL the voters in her county (obviously unrealistic and pointless, but ALL voters are wronged when some votes aren't counted.)