From the county that brought you "Little old Jewish Ladies Join Mayor Sarah Palin(R-Wasilla) to Support Pat Buchanan," the county that, when its name is spoken, still, 8 years later, shoots butterflies straight to your ballot:
Palm Beach County election officials launched a massive search Friday for about 2,500 missing ballots from last week's primary.
Where are you, you little ballots you? Oh, look, Rover's got a scent of Richard Wennett's name on official Palm Beach County stationery Go boy, go!
It seems all of us who've heavily supported paper ballots have forgotten one thing: It's plenty simple to misplace/lose/steal/destroy a few thousand pieces of paper. Or, in the case of Washington state back in 2004, never find them at all until months later.
This is not to play up DRE machines, which in addition to being vulnerable to tampering, are also, in many cases, defective. It's a warning that paper alone doesn't make our ballots safe.
More about this particular story:
County workers, including off-duty firefighters and sheriff's deputies, began searching for the missing ballots at about 780 polling places.
Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning lifted a Friday deadline for resolving the ballot issue.
"I'm confident ballots are not missing," Browning said after the commission meeting in Tallahassee. He said he was sure the search would turn up the ballots and all votes would be recounted.
Yup, Secretary of State Kurt Browning is confident the ballots are not missing. So there's nothing to worry about. After all, if we can't trust a Republican Secretary of State of Florida, who can we trust?
Well, except that Secretary Browning had this to say about the Sarasota County results in the Christine Jennings/Vernon Buchanan in Florida's 13th district in the fall of 2006:
"I am confident that the race in Sarasota County was fair and accurate," said Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Republican.
That's not to say, however, that Secretary Browning didn't take action on the subject. Oh, no, he took major action. He spent state money to try to prevent implementation of changes in balloting in accordance with the will of the people of Sarasota County:
Secretary of State Kurt Browning on Tuesday defended using public money to challenge a decision by Sarasota County voters to require paper trails on voting machines.
Browning emphasized that his agency is not challenging the right of a county to change its voting system - only a new provision in Sarasota that requires manual audits of ballots, which is inconsistent with state election law.
Sarasota voters in November made the county the first in Florida to require a voting system with a paper trail by 2008.
Of course, back in the days following the 2000 election, when he was Pasco County's Supervisor of Elections, he was more reluctant to spend money on electoral changes.
From an article by Chad Binette in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, November 10, 2000:
Touch-screen systems are expensive, and residents may not want to pay more for them when their counties have other needs, such as better roads and schools. Poorer counties may not be able to afford them at all.
Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning said it could cost his county $ 2.5 million to $ 3 million to convert to a touch-screen system. Pasco, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties have been studying such a conversion, he said.
"It's just tough to justify spending those kinds of dollars, except around election time," Browning said.
So, yes. Listen to the man behind the voting curtain. There's nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing.
But that's not all. It gets even worse.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Arthur Anderson, his staff, the canvassing board, and now Florida's Secretary of State are trying to duplicate the original vote total of 102,523 ballots cast on primary election day. A recount turned up only 99,045. Just yesterday, elections officials thought they shaved down the number of missing ballots to just 700. By Thursday night, the figure ballooned to more than 2500.
That's a pretty significant shift to have without having turned up any new ballots. And I can't help noticing that the County Supervisor of Election's name is Arthur Anderson. While I realize that the accounting firm notorious for having shredded Enron's documents was spelled Arthur Andersen, and that even were they spelled the same, it would be meaningless, it still strikes me as a bad omen.