The new touch-screen voting machines used in Miami-Dade and other counties made it impossible for someone to vote for too many candidates in one race, an over vote, and they should have made it harder for someone's vote not to register, an under vote.
As a result, such "residual votes" were down 35 percent in the state's seven biggest counties compared to two years ago, according to an analysis by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
"They spent a lot of money on this," said Stephen Ansolabehere, the project's co-director. "You'd hope that this is one place you'd see some improvement."
One of the counties that showed improvement -- by about 25 percent -- was Palm Beach, where the infamous 2000 butterfly ballot had people with magnifying glasses fighting over whether the divots of punch-card paper were "pregnant" or "hanging" chads.
"That's very good to hear," said county Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, who staged numerous mock elections throughout the county to avoid a repeat of 2000.
"I feel very bad for my neighbors to the south," she said, referring to Miami-Dade and Broward counties, where the biggest problems occurred last week. They didn't finish tallying their results until Tuesday.
The researchers studied the gubernatorial general elections in Brevard, Broward, Dade, Duval, Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Pinellas counties, all but one of which used punch-card voting in 2000. The average residual vote rate was about 3.1 percent two years ago, compared with 2.0 percent last week.
That means quite a few ballots were still classified as over votes or under votes. But some of that total could be voters who cast ballots for local races and simply decided not to vote in the gubernatorial primary. Such ballots are counted as under votes, even if they contain no mistakes.
Miami-Dade was the goat in this year's election, with dozens of precincts opening late and thousands of votes not properly downloaded from machines.
Officials are blaming most of the problems on poll workers who didn't fully understand the new technology or procedures. But the new equipment seemed to also have a few bugs that can't be laid at poll workers' feet.
There were reports of the wrong party's candidates popping up or of smudged screens registering votes for the wrong candidate. Aside from those difficulties, things went better than could have been expected -- at least technologically, Ansolabehere said.
"The emphasis from Florida was on upgrading the equipment," Ansolabehere said. "It looks like ... so far, so good."
Miami-Dade officials are already planning to have 1,000 county employees working at the precincts to enhance the volunteer corps in the November general election. The Florida Department of State will recommend $6 million in spending on voter education and poll worker training next year to try to prevent further botched elections, officials said Tuesday.
Gov. Jeb Bush said he would even consider making state employees available, if that's what it takes.
"We'll provide support, but they'll accept responsibility for making November's election far better than September's," he said.
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