Most of the 6,000 Largo residents who turned out to vote in Pinellas County's March 7 elections experienced no problems as they used the county's touch-screen voting machines. But at least two dozen voters encountered stubborn or malfunctioning equipment on that March day. Problems ranged from jammed printers to unresponsive screens. In some Largo precincts, machines refused to record voters' ballots, registering error messages instead. In other instances, voters tapped one candidate's name on the screen only to see the opposing candidate's name pop up.

At one polling place, workers had to recalibrate the machines five times. "This was a very busy and confusing day -- so many people needed help, and the machines kept doing voodoo things," the machine manager for one polling location noted in an official log.

Similar problems cropped up elsewhere in the county. In Pinellas Park, a machine manager reporting for duty found a machine already up and running at 6:10 a.m., even though all the machines were to have been turned off the day before. Later in the day, several voters, including Marshall Cook, a candidate running for an open seat on the Pinellas County Commission, also reported that the machines were highlighting the candidate opposing the one selected by the voter.

By midafternoon, all the machines in Precinct 279 seemed to be on the fritz. "Voter tried all machines -- unable to vote for mayor," the machine manager wrote. "Tried 3 'new' cards -- finally voted on last machine and it 'took.'"

After the polls closed, the county hit another snag when it took the individual machines' memory cards to election headquarters, where a central tabulation device began counting the overall results. The central tabulator froze, delaying the count for two hours. Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark says the tabulation database simply ran out of space. Once her IT staff diagnosed the problem, she says, they increased the size of the database and continued the process.

Some local election observers were aghast. Pamela Haengel, a former activist with MoveOn.org and president of Voting Integrity Alliance of Tampa Bay, demanded the state audit the results. After reviewing the results in April, the Florida Bureau of Voting Systems Certification noted some weaknesses in the process, including poll workers who needed better training, but said the election results were accurate.

Clark says the audit results proved what she'd been saying all along -- that the problems hadn't compromised the fundamental validity of the balloting. The 3,800 Seqouia Voting Systems machines the county purchased in 2001 for close to $14 million are user-friendly, Clark says, and popular among local voters. They're accessible to those with disabilities -- a new federal requirement -- and more accurate and secure than the lever machines that Florida used when Clark first joined the elections office in 1978. Tampering with the vote on those machines, she says, required little more than removing the back panels and turning the gears.

The troubles with the newer machines didn't stop with the March election, however. In August, the machines initially failed a state-mandated "logic and accuracy" test, incorrectly tallying the predetermined results of a mock election. The machines performed correctly the following day after an elections office technician restored the vote-tallying database. But local League of Women Voters Vice President Linda McGeehan says the idiosyncrasies of the machines made her wonder if the touch-screen systems really are accurately recording votes.

No chads

In the wake of the 2000 presidential balloting and the hanging-chad controversy that clouded the Florida results, the Florida Legislature responded with a law that put Florida ahead of the curve in voting system reform. The 2001 law decertified punch-card machines and required each county to replace its equipment with touch-screen devices or optical scanners.

? A state audit proves that problems with Pinellas County voting machines hadn't compromised the validity of the balloting, says Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark.

Today, 15 counties, more than 50% of the voting public in Florida, use touch-screen systems, also called DREs. The other 52 counties switched to optical scanners, a less-expensive option -- but one that the Select Task Force on Election Procedures appointed by Bush said in 2001 was preferable, at least until kinks in the touch-screen systems had been worked out.

While optical scanners can detect "overvotes," the selection of more than one candidate, touch-screen machines eliminate the possibility of overvotes entirely. DREs also minimize the potential for "undervotes" by prompting voters on a review screen and showing them what questions or ballots they might have skipped. Dawn Roberts, director of Florida's Division of Elections, notes a "dramatic" drop in the percentage of overvotes and undervotes from 2.9% of all ballots in 2000 to 0.4% of the ballots cast in 2004.

Unlike optical scanners, which use paper ballots, touch-screen systems produce no independent record of a voter's intent. Instead, the touch screens provide three internal verifications of the vote count -- once through the machine's internal memory, again on a removable cartridge and finally on a paper tape that prints within the machine.

EQUIPPED

Florida uses two types of computerized voting equipment:

? Optical scan systems: Voters mark a paper ballot, which is then fed into an electronic scanner that records the votes and stores the ballot.
? Direct recording electronic devices (DREs): Voters cast their ballots electronically by marking their choices on a computerized touch screen. Most DRE systems also have an audio headset feature for blind voters, which allows them to vote without assistance, as federally mandated. Each machine stores votes on a memory card; data are later transferred to a central tabulator, which counts all the votes.

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Election Systems & Software

Sequoia Voting Systems

MACHINES

Three voting machine vendors are certified by the state:

? Diebold Election Systems: The Texas-based subsidiary of an Ohio company supplies equipment for 31 counties, including Leon, Brevard and St. Lucie.

? Election Systems & Software: Headquartered in Omaha, Neb., ES&S systems are used by 32 counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward, Sarasota and Collier.

? Sequoia Voting Systems: The Oakland, Calif., company manufactures voting equipment used in four Florida counties: Hillsborough, Palm Beach, Pinellas and Indian River.

On the web: To find out which system your county uses, check out http://election.dos.state.fl.us/votemeth/systems/countysys.asp