Could chaos similar to Iowa happen here?
It was hanging chads in the 2000 presidential election. In 2018 it was a misplaced box of ballots and a flawed ballot design in Broward and an election recount that dragged past Christmas in Palm Beach County.
Florida has plenty of experience with election snafus — and the inevitable status as a national laughingstock that Iowa is now experiencing.
It wasn’t clear Tuesday morning precisely what went wrong in Iowa that prevented collection and dissemination of results from its presidential caucuses Monday night — the first chance for voters instead of polls and financial contributors to pick the Democratic nominee.
It was clear that it’s a mess, with at least five candidates declaring they might have won and heading to New Hampshire for next week’s primary.
“My heart was bleeding for whoever’s dealing with that,” said Wendy Sartory Link, the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections who was appointed to her job last year after problems with the way the county handled the recounting of ballots in statewide elections and a state legislative race in 2018.
Peter Antonacci, who was appointed Broward supervisor of elections as a result of problems in the 2018 elections for governor and U.S. Senate, said he didn’t want to pile on Iowa.
“There is no reason to comment on the misery of others except to say that running elections and ensuring fast accurate results is always a challenge,” he said via text message.
Florida experts said Tuesday that that despite the Sunshine State’s reputation for chaotic elections, what happened in Iowa can’t happen here.
Floridians will vote in the March 17 presidential primary — and in advance by mail and at early voting sites — on paper ballots in contests run by government election agencies; the Iowa affair was run by the state’s Democratic Party under its own rules and its own system for collecting the votes.
“You’re comparing apples to oranges,” said Steve Vancore, a Tallahassee consultant who has been involved in campaigns since the mid-1980s. “One is a privately run caucus operation run by a party with its own rules. The other is a heavily regulated, government-run system that adheres to a statutory scheme with layer upon layer of protection.”
That doesn’t guarantee that nothing will go wrong, Link said.
And, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in a tweet and in a video statement that the consternation over what happened in Iowa is nothing compared to what would happen if there really is an intrusion into a state or local election system.
“Imagine very close presidential election. Russian or Chinese hackers tamper with preliminary reporting system in key counties. When the official results begin to be tabulated it shows a different winner than the preliminary results online,” Rubio said. “While what’s happening in Iowa is not the work of a foreign intelligence agency, here’s what’s abundantly clear: Everyone is freaking out about the fact that the results are going to be delayed.”
He called Iowa a reminder that local, state and federal officials involved in elections need to be hypervigilant.
For the March presidential primary, Palm Beach County is rolling out new election equipment, designed to avoid the kinds of delays that plagued the 2018 vote counting.
Link, who visited two civic groups on Tuesday to demonstrate the new system, said the key is testing, testing and testing.
Some reports have indicated that in at least some areas of Iowa, people participating in the reporting of results hadn’t tested the system. Link declined to comment about what happened in Iowa because the situation was still evolving.
For reporting of results, Link said the secure modems on the new equipment that are used to transmit results back to the elections office on election night have been tested in each of Palm Beach County’s 465 voting locations. If there’s a place where the connection is poor, there are written instructions telling poll workers exactly where to go.
If a transmission still doesn’t work, a printout of the results will be delivered to a central location and a media stick with results is also brought in. (A printout is also posted in each polling place for the public to see.)
Besides testing the modems, Link said her office has conducted mock elections in different parts of the county to put the system through its paces.
Every ballot is cast on paper and placed in a locked bin. If the bin fills, there are procedures for a poll worker from each party to supervise the transfer to a ballot box that is sealed and recorded with a serial number.
Antonacci was appointed in late 2018 by then-Gov. Rick Scott and Link in early 2019 by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Since then, they’ve both run some municipal elections, but nothing as big as next month’s presidential preference primary, the state primary in August or the general election in November.
Link said her office is ready, but acknowledged she’s still kept up at night — by “pretty much everything about it. Because it’s new equipment, this is a big deal to be using it for the first time in a presidential election. We think we’ve really tried to anticipate it. … Whether it was our first time using the equipment or the 100th time, I’m going to be up.”
“Our goal is that nobody’s writing about Palm Beach County,” Link said.
Mitch Ceasar, a former chairman of the Broward Democratic Party whose 20-year tenure encompassed the controversial 2000 presidential election and recount, said the Iowa experience reinforces the need to be careful when rolling out new technology. “Technology has its pluses, and now we have learned again that it has its minuses,” he said. Ceasar is one of several candidates running for supervisor of elections; Antonacci isn’t seeking the job.
Broward’s name came up in the aftermath of the Iowa caucus issues. Max Steele, a former communications director for the Florida Democratic Party who now works for Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign, told the Washington Post that “Iowa is the Broward County of caucuses.” The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said on Twitter that “Tens of thousands of ballots all for Joe Biden being shipped to Iowa from Broward County Florida as we speak.”
And Hunter Pollack, who has become a political activist after his sister was killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, theorized on Twitter that Antonacci’s predecessor as supervisor of elections had relocated to Iowa. “Is Brenda Snipes counting the votes in Iowa?”
Broward County Commissioner Michael Udine, who serves on the threemember elections Canvassing Board, said after seeing what happened in Iowa he reached out to Antonacci first thing Tuesday morning and will meet with him Wednesday afternoon.
“People in the community, in either party, are concerned about votes being cast accurately,” he said. “I want to see what we have from top to bottom and just have him run me through.”
He said he’s confident in Broward’s elections operation based on what he saw. But, he said, those contests were much smaller than this year’s. “I’m sure it will be fine and run properly. But an ounce of preparation is better than a pound of cure.”