Technician's Error, Not Machines, To Blame In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Election Mix-Up by Oscar Corral
Technician's Error, Not Machines, To Blame In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Election Mix-Up by Oscar Corral© 2002by Oscar Corral, Miami Herald
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
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Thursday, April 4, 2002 — The computers were in place. The technology had been tested. All Medley voters had to do was touch a screen.
But Miami-Dade's new voting system, which was designed to minimize uncertainty and make hand recounts all but obsolete, stumbled Tuesday over a roadblock as old as civilization itself: human error.
A software technician made a mistake last week on a computer program, and the Medley ballots were tallied based on the bad programming. Before it was straightened out, candidates who really lost thought they had won, and those who really won thought they had lost. [And now we have foolishly placed our democracy in the hands of some nameless "technician," working for a private company on secret software that is not visible to anyone, with no public oversight.]
"It's unfortunate that we had this minor error in a simple program," County Elections Supervisor David Leahy said. "But I still have full confidence in our new systems." [But see Florida elections in 2002 for follow up.]
The mix-up occurred during the first election test in Miami-Dade of a system that uses touch-screen machines in the polls and cards read by optical scanners for absentee ballots. Leahy plans to make changes to avoid similar problems in future city elections and in the larger countywide elections in September and November.
In the future, Leahy said county election workers, not technicians from the equipment company, will program all the touch-screen and absentee ballot machines before an election to try to limit the possibility of error. [And where are counties to find such skilled, infallible programmers, willing to work no more than a few weeks a year? The H1-B visa program, perhaps?]
He also suggested that humans might add up the absentee ballots with the touch-screen voting results to double check the computer's tally. [Ah yes, pay millions for the machines and then do a hand count anyway. Common sense suggests simply doing away with the machines.]
However, the losing candidates are not satisfied with the explanation.
Mabelin Diaz, who received 13 votes, the fewest of all Medley candidates for town council, said she plans to hire a lawyer to fight the results and demand a new election.
Another losing candidate, Zuleika Luna, thinks the new system — while more technologically advanced than punch-card ballots — can cast as much doubt over election results as the old system did during the 2000 presidential election.
"A lot of people are just not trusting the electronic device they're using," Luna said. "We don't think it's reliable. It shows that human error is still possible."
The origin of Medley's unsettling experience was a mistake made March 28, 2002. A technician from the Omaha, Neb.-based Election System and Software, which makes the iVotronix computers bought by the county, went into the memory card program on the absentee ballot counter to change the heading from "district two" to "City of Medley," said Mike Limas, ESS Chief Operating Officer.
In changing the header, the technician also inadvertently bumped the first candidate on the alphabetical list, Carlos A. Benedetto, to the bottom of the list.
When the technician saved the edit, a prompt most likely popped up on the monitor asking him if he was sure he wanted to change the order of the names. The technician ignored the prompt and confirmed the change.
"It was something that should have been picked up and caught and was missed and was not flagged because the normal follow-up procedures to making a change in the database were not followed," Limas said.
The absentee ballots were counted in the reprogrammed order, with Benedetto at the bottom of the list, and the other five candidates listed in alphabetical order above. [Nothing new here. History repeatedly demonstrates that votes counted in secret tend to give dishonest results. Computers simply make it more difficult to detect and provide a convenient scapegoat, the "technician," when fraud is detected.]
After the ballots were scanned in, an election worker took the disc from that system and downloaded the results into a laptop computer at Medley City Hall.
The results from the touch-screen voting were also eventually downloaded into the laptop, Leahy said. Using ES&S' Unity software called Election Reporting Manager, the computer combined the touch-screen results, which were listed alphabetically, with the absentee results, which had Benedetto's name on the bottom.
City Clerk Herlina Taboada announced Diaz a winner and Benedetto a loser, only to correct the results moments later after county election supervisors and ESS technicians spotted the error. The absentee ballot results were double-checked by old fashioned hand counting.
Another small community, Bay Harbor Islands, used the same technology for its election Tuesday but had no problems because no one misprogrammed the software.
Leahy said he is concerned because the computer did not raise any red flags, and humans had to spot the error.
"If something is amiss you should get some type of error message, but there wasn't one," he said.
Leahy acknowledges that the potential for major problems must be addressed by September, when voters countywide will use the new system. Medley's election used only one ballot style or design. September's election will use 523 ballot styles in Miami-Dade alone.
"We don't intend to have any errors this fall," he said. [But he was disastrously wrong. See next section.]
Analysts say these growing pains are to be expected from touch-screen voting.
"Any time a new technology is implemented, there's going to be a chance of something major going on," said Thomas Palfrey, a political science and economics professor at the California Institute of Technology who published a voter technology report this summer. "That's just a lesson from history."
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| Chapter 8 — Voting Problems In The 2002 Elections |
| Next — Florida Elections In 2002 |