Miami-Dade County election chief quits amid criticism

Published Friday, April 1, 2005

Miami-Dade County election chief quits amid criticism

The Associated Press
MIAMI
Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan, who was recruited to help the county erase the embarrassing memories of the 2000 presidential election, has resigned amid revelations of voting problems in six elections.

The veteran Chicago election official, who took over in Miami in June 2003, resigned Thursday effective immediately. Her chief deputy Lester Sola will take her place at least temporarily.

County Manager George Burgess described the decision as mutual after questioning Kaplan about a voting glitch that lost hundreds of ballots in a special election. She blamed a software fluke.

The problem came to light when officials noticed a high number of undervotes in a slot machine referendum March 8. Undervotes are ballots with no recorded votes, and the measure was the only item on the ballot.
(snip/...)

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050401/APN/504010568

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/8471447.htm
April 20, 2004
Voters unable to have printed receipt

Miami-Dade election officials say they can't install printers on the county's 7,200 voting machines in time for this year's presidential election because they lack state approval and the technology.

By Luisa Yanez, lyanez@herald.com
A proposal to add printers to Miami-Dade's touch screen voting machines by November's presidential election fizzled Monday. The culprit: The available technology is not state certified, election officials said.

''We simply cannot use the technology if it's not state certified, even if the printers were available,'' Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan told the County Commission's election subcommittee, while presenting the findings of a 309-page report.

AND:

http://www.hatless.com/blog/archive/000435.html
Did Miami-Dade's contractor on the ES&S deployment not perform setup and testing of backups, a normal part of any server deployment project? Did Miami-Dade's elections office opt not to have backups at all? Was the IT department simply not performing backups during the entire year of 2003 and clicking "cancel" on pesky reminders to insert a new tape that popped up every day?

We may never know, since the server activity logs were presumably lost in the crashes too.

Which is all well and good, but it raises a question: if Jeb! and the state senate deemed it necessary to remove Ms. Oliphant from her Broward post for what may have been a few thousand botched and thwarted votes (if you include the botched polling-staion openings and closings that happened on her watch), what should happen to Miami-Dade elections supervisor Connie Kaplan, whose office lost the records of the entire 2002 primary and general elections, and may have tried to cover it up the way it did the previously-reported data corruption problems? As the NYT reported in June (reprint via the Tampa Trib):

'A Miami-Dade watchdog group asked Secretary of State Glenda Hood's office last month to allow an independent review of the touch-screen machines now used by 15 of 67 counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. The office said that only counties were authorized to seek such audits, and told reporters that the request was an effort to undermine voter confidence.
Through a public-records request, the coalition obtained e-mail messages and other documents from Miami-Dade election officials who referred to a flaw in the touch-screen equipment's ability to audit election results ... The e-mail messages date back as far as June 2003.

Constance Kaplan, the Miami-Dade County elections supervisor, publicly acknowledged the problem this spring. This month, the company that makes the machines, Elections Systems and Software, provided software to correct the flaw, which the county and state say will not affect the machines' accuracy.

"It is important to note that the anomaly was rare, and all votes were counted as the anomaly did not affect the vote itself but rather the audit after," Ms. Hood's office wrote in a statement Tuesday.

Nicole de Lara, Ms. Hood's communications director, said that Ms. Kaplan's office had "unfortunately" not alerted Ms. Hood to the problem, and that she first learned of it from an article in The Daily Business Review in late May. Some critics suspect that Kast's resignation was related to the malfunction, but Mr. Kast said in aninterview it was not.'

This quote got me thinking.

Did Miami-Dade's contractor on the ES&S deployment not perform setup and testing of backups, a normal part of any server deployment project? Did Miami-Dade's elections office opt not to have backups at all? Was the IT department simply not performing backups during the entire year of 2003 and clicking "cancel" on pesky reminders to insert a new tape that popped up every day?

We may never know, since the server activity logs were presumably lost in the crashes too.


Perhaps you can rig an election so that the BoE looks bad. Then you replace them with someone more...let's say, pliant? :shrug:
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:grr:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=203

:)

I recall that Miami-Dade was the only large Florida county that didn't seem to have a major skew towards Bush compared to 2000. Like, they forgot to install 'the patch'?!?

She did it the last day of March!

Here's a link to some information about the terrible, terrible things that happened in some Native American schools run by the church in Canada. Note the first reference--it's by Ward Churhill!

http://www.religioustolerance.org/sch_resid1.htm