With final report of St. Lucie voting disaster there's 'no way election that resulted in the alleged defeat of Allen West can be verified if this report is accurate'-commenter

.
After "a manual recount of nearly 38,000 early votes. Murphy was ultimately declared the winner by a slim margin of less than 1,800 votes."...

1/4/13, "Election report: Palm Beach’s Bucher responded properly to ballot flaws but St. Lucie tally flawed," Palm Beach Post, Dara Kam

"Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher appropriately handled the hand-copying of 27,000 flawed absentee ballots that were the fault of the printer, Florida state elections officials found in a review issued Friday.

But the problems in St. Lucie County that held up the results of the presidential election and prompted a recount in one of the country’s most-watched congressional races were a combination of “staff inexperience and inadequate procedures” fueled by faulty equipment, according to the report issued by Secretary of State Ken Detzner’s office.

The report comes as Detzner prepares recommendations for the legislature based on discussions with election supervisors in five “under-performing” counties, including Palm Beach and St. Lucie.

St. Lucie was the only county to miss the Nov. 18 noon deadline for filing final election results with the state. The delay was caused in part by problems with voting tabulation equipment.

Mislabeled memory cards were also to blame, Friday’s report found. But St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections Gertrude Walker’s office made the situation worse, the report prepared by the Division of Elections found.

“Despite well-intentioned efforts, staff inexperience, and inadequate procedures compounded issues, resulting in additional technical and procedural errors,” the report said.

Neither Bucher nor Walker could be reached for comment Friday afternoon.

Observers sent by Detzner to St. Lucie County found:

• Four separate incidents of memory card failures.
• Numerous ballot-scanning errors in which some ballots were double-scanned or only one of two pages were scanned during retabulation and the early vote recount.
• Incomplete official results.
• Missing ballot-accounting logs.

The report also criticized Walker for waiting until election night to upload all of the early voting results instead of uploading the results earlier as allowed under Florida law.

St. Lucie’s elections mishaps came to light in the razor-thin U.S. House District 18 contest that prompted a prolonged recount and at least two lawsuits. U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who was sworn in on Thursday, defeated tea party icon Allen West, who filed two lawsuits against Walker seeking a manual recount of nearly 38,000 early votes. Murphy was ultimately declared the winner by a slim margin of less than 1,800 votes.

Angry West supporters targeted Walker after she admitted that her staff mistakenly double-counted some ballots and ignored others on election night.

The delay in the St. Lucie results again put Florida in an unwelcome national spotlight.

The report detailed the memory card technical problems that contributed to the hold-up.

Four memory cards containing 10,700 ballots cast in early voting failed to upload because they were misidentified. Memory cards are assigned to specific tabulation machines by their 

• identification and when a memory card is misidentified, the tabulation machine will not upload the results.
• On Election Day, one memory card failed as it was uploading early voting results. Election officials were forced to rescan 6,249 ballots using a replacement memory card.
• A memory card used in early voting failed on its third day of use while it was being reformatted. The votes could not be retrieved and election officials had to rescan the ballots on Election Day. Election staff compounded the problem by failing to re-tabulate all the early voting ballots on the replacement memory card.
• Two older-generation memory cards failed for unknown reasons as the deadline for filing results to the state department approached. Election staff tried to manually input the affected votes but did not finish before the deadline.

Detzner’s office made recommendations based on the audit, including advising Walker to pair up with a larger county to learn how to handle multiple-page ballots.

But state officials, who also certify voting equipment, also issued a warning to Dominion Voting Systems Inc., the vendor of the problematic AccuVote OS memory card that failed on at least four occasions in St. Lucie.

“In particular, Dominion needs to have a plan in place that will give the Division of Elections and its customers (Supervisors of Elections) confidence in the memory cards and to provide that plan to Division of Elections as soon as possible. The plan should address the root cause, corrective action and a backup plan if the correction continues to have failures,” the report said....

The Palm Beach County analysis supported Bucher’s decision to hand-copy 27,000 faulty absentee ballots and confirmed Bucher’s contention that Runbeck Election Services of Tempe, Ariz., was to blame for the flaw.

The ballots did not include heading labels over merit retention races for judges, which meant that they could not be tabulated properly.

Bucher and her staff identified the printing error on a first set of ballot proofs and sent the corrections to the printer. Her staff proofread a second version of the ballots and approved them for printing. But Runbeck then mistakenly printed the original set of ballots rather than the corrected ballots, which were then mailed before being re-examined.

Runbeck President Kevin Bannon accepted blame for the problem and paid the duplication costs.

Detzner’s observers found that Bucher’s duplication process “was conducted in a fair and impartial manner,” according to the report. But the report recommended that Bucher include a random additional review of printed ballots before they are mailed or distributed on election day." via Free Republic

======================================
FR commenter
=================================

"There is no way that the results of the election that resulted in the alleged defeat of Allen West can be verified if this report is accurate.

Susan Bucher, supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County is portrayed as either a bumbling incompetent or deliberately sabotaging the reelection of Congressman Allen West. This is a disgrace."

.