(Part of UPI's Special Report on Election 2002)
MIAMI (UPI) -- The south Florida election mess got so bad, Miami-Dade County is treating itself like a third-world country.
The County Commission is hiring the Center for Democracy in Washington to monitor the Nov. 5 general election at the cost of $92,000.
The center usually works with third world countries or countries torn by civil unrest. It has never been called on to work in an election in the United States.
At one point, six Cuban-American commissioners walked out of a meeting to forestall a vote expected to approve the plan. It was approved by a 6-5 vote a week later.
Natacha Seijas had said she didn't want the county to be compared to nations with troubled pasts.
"We're not Haiti, we're not Nicaragua, we're not Russia and I refuse to go near any of those feelings," Seijas told The Miami Herald. "Because it was a horrible feeling they had when they were not free, and I don't want to feel that way."
In Broward County, just to the north, government officials considered trying to fire Miriam Oliphant as supervisor of elections but since the post is elected, they did the next best thing -- they took away most of her powers.
The problem began the night of the 2000 presidential election. After five weeks of bitterly contested recounts and court battles -- which made the Sunshine State the butt of jokes all over the world -- Republican George W. Bush won the presidency by 537 votes over former Vice President Al Gore.
The blame was laid ultimately on antiquated punch card vote-counting technology, and at the "ground zero" of the contest -- Palm Beach County -- the terms "butterfly ballot" and "hanging chad" became part of the American language.
Miami-Dade County and Broward County, where Fort Lauderdale is located, also had problems counting ballots and so did other counties to a lesser degree.
Then came election reform and the replacement of punch card machines with ATM-like touch-screens that were supposed to simplify the process. Miami-Dade County alone spent $24.5 million on new machines.
The first real test was the Sept. 10 primary elections and 65 of the state's 67 counties, including Palm Beach, got passing grades. South Florida failed. It took an extra week to count the ballots in Miami and Fort Lauderdale before it was determined Tampa lawyer Bill McBride had defeated former Attorney General Janet Reno in the Democratic primary for governor.
The performance in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties was not as bad as it was in 2000.
It was worse.
Many of the poll workers who showed up were untrained or poorly trained and were not computer literate. Precincts opened late -- some of them by four hours.
Vote counts didn't get back to the offices where they were to be tallied and certified in time. In some locations it took 24 hours.
McBride is now taking on Gov. Jeb Bush, and he is trying to pin the fiasco on the incumbent for not paying enough personal attention to election reform. Bush, the president's brother, is blaming the Democratic supervisors of election in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties.
In south Florida, everybody involved was pointing fingers at everybody else. The governor and the mayors and county commissions blamed the elections supervisors and the supervisors blamed the poll workers. The workers blamed all of the hierarchy above them for not providing enough training, and many of them quit.
Now -- in effort to fix matters properly before Nov. 5 -- Oliphant and Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy are getting a lot of help.
Miami-Dade County Manager Steve Shiver has officially added election duties to the job description of all 29,000 county employees. More specifically, he has told 2,200 mid- and senior-level employees -- most of the them computer savvy -- to work at the county's 553 polling places.
Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas has said repeatedly that heads will roll if the election and vote counting doesn't go smoothly Nov. 5. Those heads are most likely to belong to Leahy and Shiver.
Oliphant is in equally deep water in Broward County. She has agreed under pressure to turn over control of much of the November balloting to the county, and the commission has final say over all decisions. She also was forced to rehire former Deputy Supervisor Joe Cotter as an administrator with clout.
It is all eroding her political power, but she isn't up for re-election until 2004 and if the general election is a success, two years might be enough to rehabilitate her reputation.
Kurt Browning, the supervisor of elections in Pasco County, on the state's west coast, said several election supervisors believe Oliphant's problems stem from inexperience. For one thing, he said, she replaced too many people when she was elected in 2000.
He and other elections officials fear the problems in the south will tarnish the whole state's reputation again.
Browning said talk show host Phil Donahue asked recently, "Are these people just stupid?" referring to Florida elections officials.
Elsewhere in the state, unlike the 2000 election, things went relatively smoothly in September. Pat Pochopin, an elections assistant in Collier County in southwest Florida, pointed out nine other counties used the new iVotronic machines used in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties for the first time Sept. 10, and encountered no significant problems.
