On Tuesday night, Susan Bucher, the supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County, announced that vote-counting machines had overheated and stopped working — requiring staff to redo a recount of 174,900 early-vote ballots that took a day and a half to get through the first time, according to reporting by The Washington Post.
"We are disappointed by the mechanical problems," Bucher said. "We're working 24/7 to get the job done."
WPTV Channel 5 reported that a mechanic had been flown in to work on the machines.
Bucher already had assured the public she could not recount the U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner races, as well as a local state House race, by Thursday's state-mandated deadline.
A Leon County Circuit Court judge granted her a reprieve, allowing her more time, but that was immediately undone as Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner petitioned to move the case to federal court.
The county is alone in the state in using a particular type of equipment, made by the now-defunct company Sequoia Voting Systems, that cannot recount more than one race at a time.
Bucher, who inherited the equipment when she took office in 2009, has gotten the county to set aside $11 million to pay for new counting equipment but has held off on a purchase as the state wrestles with how voting systems must meet the Americans with Disabilities Act by a 2020 deadline.
"I don't think it's very responsible to spend $11.1 million on new equipment that's not going to be viable in 2020," Bucher said Tuesday.
Recounts in Palm Beach and Broward counties have drawn sharp criticism from both Gov. Rick Scott and President Donald Trump, both of whom have alleged that Bucher and neighboring supervisor, Brenda Snipes of Broward County, have engaged in fraud because they kept counting ballots for several days after Election Day.
In every election, ballots are counted after Election Day, with big counties traditionally taking longer because they have more questionable ballots to examine. No evidence of fraud has been uncovered as the recounts have unfolded under an intense media glare.
At stake in the recounts are close races for governor, U.S. senator, agriculture commissioner and several state legislative seats, including House District 89 in Palm Beach County, where the candidates are separated by 37 votes.
Unless the courts order an extension, counties have until 3 p.m. Thursday to complete machine recounts in those races. If the margin of victory remains within 0.25 percent, election officials would likely be required to eyeball hundreds or even thousands of overvotes and undervotes cast in those races. An overvote is when more than one candidate is selected; an undervote is when no candidate is selected.
Sometimes, the human eye can detect evidence of a voters' intent on such ballots that escaped detection by the computer.
The machine recount sets up the hand recount by separating undervotes and overvotes from the larger body of ballots. In Palm Beach County, Bucher is looking at recounting nearly 600,000 ballots three times in the statewide races and about 80,000 ballots in the District 89 race.
In Leon County Circuit Court Tuesday, Judge Karen Gievers said Palm Beach County expected to complete its U.S. Senate machine recount late Tuesday, three days after it began. It cannot move on to the next recount, Gievers wrote in an order extending the county's time to finish, until it completes the hand recount of overvotes and undervotes discovered during the machine recount.
Under state law, if the county doesn't get done by 3 p.m. Thursday its initial count, completed Saturday, is submitted to the state.
Bucher said Monday that her office was confident it could complete a recount in the Senate race, where Scott, a Republican, is attempting to unseat Democrat Bill Nelson. But Bucher wasn't as optimistic about completing recounts in the other races by Thursday.
Bucher's office confronts a trifecta of travails as it attempts to complete the recounts.
First, Palm Beach County is the third most populous in the state. Nearly 600,000 people cast ballots in the highest profile races, those for governor and U.S. Senate.
The second issue is the unprecedented number of recounts that must be performed. A single recount after an election isn't atypical. But recounts in such high-stakes, high-profile races as governor, U.S. Senate and agriculture commission — at the same time — present a huge challenge even for counties with the most up-to-date equipment.
"This is a very difficult undertaking," said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. "Those deadlines are going to be hard to meet. I'm pretty sure when the Legislature set that deadline, they never contemplated three statewide recounts."
The final hurdle Bucher's office faces is the limitation of her voting equipment.
Equipment in other counties can retabulate ballots in multiple races at the same time.
In Palm Beach County, the recount will be slowed by equipment that can only handle one race at a time. That means the nearly 600,000 ballots cast in the big statewide races have to be run once, then again and still again.
Ion Sancho, the recently retired supervisor of elections in Leon County, said the seeds of Palm Beach County's problems were sown by Bucher's predecessor, Arthur Anderson.
"This is an instance of be careful what you wish for," Sancho said.
Anderson ran for and won election on a platform of upgrading equipment used by his predecessor, Theresa LePore, who oversaw the infamous butterfly ballot and the county's many recounts during the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential battle.
In 2007, Anderson bought new equipment from Sequoia to convert from touchscreen voting to fill-in-the-bubble-style paper ballots. He picked Sequoia because the county already used the company's tabulators and he would not have to commit to the large expense of buying new tabulation equipment if he stayed with the same vendor.
Competitor Dominion Voting Systems, which would buy Sequoia in 2010, told commissioners Sequoia was selling "old technology" to the county.
Bucher, then a term-limited state legislator running for the supervisor's job, urged the county to go in a different direction.
Now, the equipment — and its limitations and headaches — belong to her office.
Staff writer Christine Stapleton contributed to this story.
©2018 The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
