BlogWood: MT Archives

More incompetence from Jeb! appointee Buddy Johnson

What with all the excitement of going to NYC, dealing with numerous hurricanes, and simply trying to keep up with paying the bills, I haven’t chimed in at all on the numerous problems Hillsborough County experienced during our recent primary.

We’ve been getting lots of national press, none of it good, and Hillsborough Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson is on the hot seat. Despite the problems, many, if not all, related to the new touch screen voting machines, Buddy is sticking to his “no paper trail needed here” platform.

First, on election night, Buddy’s brand new computers couldn’t count the votes.

After hours and hours of troubleshooting, the problem was blamed on an indexing error. As a computer person, I know that indexing errors are, perhaps, the single most common cause of database problems. At the very least, indexing is always a prime suspect. Despite this well known fact, it took Buddy’s guys all night to figure out what the problem was.

Incompetence.

Next, votes were lost. 245 votes from one precinct in Tampa were not counted. Buddy blamed this computer related mistake on human error.

``We're very disappointed this happened,'' he said.

Incompetence.

Now, we learn that Buddy has had the wrong vote totals: posted on his official county website since whenever he figured out what he wanted the final tally to be.

For three weeks since the Aug. 31 primary, the Web site of Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson included this obvious contradiction: a total of 118,699 people turned out to vote countywide, while 125,891 voted in the race for state attorney.

That's 7,192 more votes than voters.

Did the county's new-fangled touch screen voting machines go haywire and tabulate extra votes? Was there a ballot-stuffing scandal in the race for county prosecutor?

No, it was something even more predictable in the recent history of vote tabulation in Hillsborough County.

It was human error, Johnson said Wednesday.

Johnson's staff somehow underreported the voter turnout on the county elections Web site, and no one noticed it until a St. Petersburg Times reporter brought it to Johnson's attention during an interview Wednesday morning.

"I don't know why it's there," Johnson said after consulting with his staff two different times.

Incompetence.

Funny, how Buddy bends over backwards to describe errors as human. That’s probably because his opponent in the race is a computer consultant, a proven manager who is a strong backer of paper trails for computerized voting machines.

Check out Rob Mackenna, and send Jeb!’s lackey packing this November.

Register NOW to vote - deadline is looming!