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Pasco Voting System Getting Big Overhaul

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By Carl  Orth | The Suncoast News

Published: October 6, 2007

PORT RICHEY, Fla. - PORT RICHEY, Fla. - The future in Pasco elections arrived this week with the shipment of 175 optical scanners for counting paper ballots.

"They're still in the boxes," Pasco Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley said about the 175 units, which are being stored at a Dade City warehouse.

The first test of the new voting system will come during city elections in April 2008, Corley said, before going countywide in the earlier primary Aug. 26, 2008.

Voters will fill in circles on a paper ballot to choose candidates. The scanner then will read the marks and create a paper trail.

The last hurrah for the touch-screen voting machines will come during the presidential preference primary Jan. 29, Corley said during a Sept. 28 appearance before a West Pasco Chamber of Commerce audience.

Poll workers will be busy rolling out an electronic registration system during the Jan. 29 balloting, Corley said.

So, that would not be a good time to launch the scanners, the elections chief decided. Nor could he arrange to get 1,000 additional privacy booths and other gear in time for the January vote.

Under the new system, poll workers will no longer consult a computer print-out to confirm a would-be voter is registered.

Instead, voters will be able to swipe their driver's license in a machine that will read the identification information encoded in the magnetic stripe on the back of the license and compare it with electronic voter registration records.

For voters without a driver license the EVID system can also conduct a search using a voter's name and date of birth.

The Electronic Voter ID Device, or EVID, system might take as little as 10 seconds for voters to check in, Corley believes. Pasco is one of 12 Florida counties using EVID, he said.

"It's extremely secure," Corley remarked. "You cannot physically vote in one precinct and then another in 5 minutes." EVID will raise a red flag in such a situation, he said.

The state mandated the switch to the optical-scan voting system because of concerns over security and accuracy of the touch-screen technology.

Things came to a head in November 2006 in a hotly contested 13th Congressional District race in Sarasota County. Republican Vern Buchanan won by 368 votes over Democrat Christine Jennings in the initial balloting.

Eyebrows were raised among recount officials and Democratic Party leader over an unusually large number of ballots where no vote at all was cast in the race. There were about 18,000 of these "undervotes" in the Buchanan-Jennings contest.

Many of the people who defend the vote count in the District 13 U.S. House race suggest the undervotes were the result of voters turned off by the bruising nature of the contest between Buchanan and Jennings. The candidates traded numerous charges of alleged ethical lapses.

"They are adamant it was just voter disgust" over the mudslinging battle between the two candidates, Corley said.

Plenty of challenges

In January, Corley was appointed to fill the vacancy when former Pasco elections chief Kurt Browning was chosen as Florida secretary of state by Gov. Charlie Crist.

Since then, the presidential preference primary was moved from March to Jan. 29.

"Then the governor came out with the plan to completely overhaul our voting system" with optical-scan gear.

The primary for 2008 county and state elections was moved up to Aug. 26 next year.

The super homestead proposal might not be listed on the Jan. 29 ballot because a judge recently threw out the current wording. An appeal is in progress.

On top of that, Corley has to run his own campaign for another term as supervisor after filling the remainder of Browning's term.

If that's not enough, Corley has to live up to the extremely high standards Browning set as supervisor since 1980.

"It is an absolute terrifying time, yet I wouldn't want to be anywhere else," Corley commented.

"If I seem a little animated, it's not the three cups of coffee I just wolfed down," Corley said at the breakfast meeting. "It's the adrenaline rush of being the supervisor of elections."

Florida has been a "lightning rod" for controversy since the 2000 presidential election.

"Remember the days of the pregnant chads, the hanging chads and all the chads?"

"The idea is we want to get Florida out of the butt of jokes. We've heard them all. It gets real old after a while." He got a bit defensive about Florida jokes while he was at a national training center after first taking the job.

Budget battles

"This has been a brutal, brutal budget cycle."

Corley got a call from Mike Nurrenbrock, director of the Pasco County Office of Management and Budget, this spring. Because of property tax reforms, Nurrenbrock asked Corley to keep his budget proposal the same as the previous fiscal year.

"After I stopped laughing for 25 minutes, I picked the phone back up."

The county's 2008 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, includes the presidential preference primary, the earlier primary in August and new voting equipment, he explained.

Corley managed to save some $313,000 nonetheless because of some shrewd moves. He managed to recycle the voting privacy booths from the touch-screen gear instead of buying brand new ones. And he picked up a bargain from Sarasota County that had a used machine to help with recounts.

'No perfect system'

Voter intent could become a factor in recounts with the new optical-scan system, Corley said.

He hypothesized that a voter making a mistake might put an X over the oval for one candidate and circle the oval for his candidate of choice.

Canvassing board members might be in for some real interesting meetings trying to interpret ballots in close races.

"There is no perfect system."

The irony is, Corley said, that touch-screen machines will endure for disabled voters. There will be no paper trail on their votes.

As an aside, Corley noted how legislation failed to give voters an option for "none of the above" in each race listed on a ballot. No candidate relished the prospect of losing to "none of the above."

The other option might have been to attach printers to touch-screen voting machines, Corley observed. But he was told technical limitations prevented that.

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