Employee stumbles across missing FL ballot box

In a find that could possibly turn Pinellas County, Florida from red to blue, an employee cleaning a desk came across a box containing 268 uncounted absentee ballots. The margin for George Bush in Pinellas County stands at just 226 votes, prior to this discovery.

More after the jump.

According to the article, this is not the first time that Pinellas has experienced irregularities under the watchful eye of Jeb Bush appointee, Election Supervisor Deborah Clark.

This is the third time since Clark became election supervisor in 2000 that her office has had problems handling ballots.

In the presidential race in 2000, the office neglected to count 1,400 ballots - and counted more than 900 ballots twice. In 2001, her office misplaced six absentee ballots in a Tarpon Springs city election.

For some unexplained reason, Clark's staff did not follow procedure to check the sum total of ballots tallied matched the number of ballots received.

Clark said her office has a system to track the boxes, but she could not describe it in detail during a phone interview from her home Monday night. [...]

Normally, Clark would have detected the missing ballots when her staff checked to ensure that every ballot was accounted for.

Usually, every ballot, whether filed absentee or at a polling place, is registered into a computer system. After the election, workers compare the number recorded in the computer to the number of ballots.

For some reason, the staff did not perform the procedure.

A quick Google search of Mrs. Clark comes up with several oddities, and a potential conflict-of-interest -- the county election supervisor's husband was employed by voting machine manufacturer ES&S, who was awarded over $400,000 in sales of their voting equipment to the county.

While Deborah Clark worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband's employer was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office.

Now, Clark heads the office, and that company, Elections Systems & Software, is a leading contender to land a lucrative contract -- worth as much as $15-million -- to sell new voting machines to Pinellas County, records show.

Clark said Wednesday evening she sees no conflict of interest, and pointed out that the contracts were handled by her predecessor.

The above article goes on to mention that Clark's deputy is also connected by family ties to the voting machine manufacturer.

To complicate matters, Clark's deputy administrator, Karen Butler, is the sister of Sandra Mortham, Florida's former secretary of state and now a lobbyist for ES&S before the state Legislature. Butler is one of more than a dozen senior staff members helping to evaluate competing systems, but she told the Times that family ties won't matter.

In 2002, many voters were given the wrong ballots, possibly swinging the election for the fire commissioner.

Pinellas County elections officials said human error was to blame for
more than 600 voters getting the wrong ballot in Tuesday's election.

Election workers mislabeled machines that activate the cards Pinellas voters
insert into touch-screen voting machines to display their ballots.

The mislabeled activators in five precincts caused 633 voters in
unincorporated Lealman, between St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park, to get
ballots with referendum questions from those cities rather than the Lealman
fire commission race, officials said.

The problem could have affected the outcome of a fire commission race
decided by 582 votes, officials said.

"Obviously I feel terrible about it,'' said Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark.
"We've already changed our internal procedures to check activators more than
once.''

The problem was fixed early in four of the precincts. But it wasn't caught until
late in the day at the fifth, where 444 voters got the wrong ballot and had no
chance to vote for fire commissioner.

Despite the confusion, officials certified the election.

In the 2000 presidential election, the county was initially called for Bush, until discoveries led to a significant swing -- subtracting 61 erroneous votes for Bush and adding 417 missing votes for Gore -- putting the county in the Gore column.

Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, will have to redo its count because a poll worker inadvertently failed to run an unknown number of ballots through its computer Wednesday, county Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said. The county retracted its original announcement that Gore had gained 404 votes and Bush dropped by 61 votes in its recount.