Glitches scrutinized, but South Florida elections officials vouch for voting systems. Landing on Colbert doesn’t help.

The call came at 5:30 a.m.

It was a Saturday, the morning after the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office sent vote-by-mail ballots to 4,155 U.S. citizens living overseas or active duty military servicemembers and their family members. More than half, sent via email, had a link to a ballot with an error: Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was listed as “Tom Walz.”

Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link was confounded.

Everything that goes on the ballot is checked repeatedly. Outsiders, including candidates and representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties, are invited to review the ballots. Link even wondered at first if a nefarious actor was sending spoofing emails to voters with fake ballots.

Within a few hours, she and her staff figured out what happened. Instead of copying and pasting the final, proofread version from Link’s office, the outside vendor that prepared the 2,687 electronic ballots for overseas and military voters had re-inputted a small amount of information. Someone typed an “o” instead of an “i” in Walz’s first name.

Potentially affected voters — 257 — were notified. A fix was issued. And, Link said, it wouldn’t affect the casting or tabulation of votes.

Increasingly, conspiracy theorists and others who seek to undermine elections seize on small, scattered incidents — even if they have no effect on the outcome — to promote broad, unproven and false claims that U.S. elections are rife with problems. An error like the Walz name, regardless of its significance, sets back their efforts and gives fuel to critics.

Burst of attention

It didn’t end there, however.

The day after Link received that early-morning call on Sept. 21, the “Tom Walz” ballot error was on the homepage of the The New York Times website, after a voter alerted the news organization. A day later it was in the text crawling across the bottom of the screen on CNN.

And it ended up as a punchline during the host’s monologue on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

More significant than the return of Palm Beach County and Florida to late night TV as the butt of election-related humor — decades after hanging chads and vote counting became a comedic stable in the aftermath of the 2000 election — the Tim Walz/Tom Walz glitch joined a pantheon of election-related mishaps.

As if on cue, commenters on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter — two social media sites known for users promulgating election disinformation — along with the social media site Threads used the opportunity to claim something sinister was going on.

Link, Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott, and other election administrators across the state and nation, have gone to great lengths to answer questions, counter some voters misgivings, and refute election misinformation, often misgivings, and refute and counter some voters’ misgivings about elections and election misinformation — often fueled by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

“That’s the reason that we strive to have no errors … and we don’t want any hiccups or glitches, whether it’s from a vendor or internally, because we want people to have confidence in the system,” Link said.

Scott condemned efforts to undermine faith in voting.

“We definitely try to do everything we can to make sure that we’re building confidence. But there are folks out there who are just looking for every little thing to sort of degrade public confidence in elections,” Scott said. “It is a human process with a lot of human beings doing this work and, and there will be mistakes from time to time.”

“I think that the overwhelming majority of people out there understand that things can go wrong from time to time, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s some kind of a broader conspiracy afoot. It’s hard for me to even believe that anybody who would say something like that is being sincere. I think a lot of times those people really are people who just don’t want to accept the election system, don’t want to accept the outcome of elections,” he said.

Very few votes

The spelling error involved U.S. citizens living overseas, and active duty military members and their family members.

Under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, referred to in election circles as UOCAVA, those voters have the option of receiving a mailed ballot, which must be returned via mail, or receiving a link to a ballot that must be printed and returned to the elections office by fax or mail.

Palm Beach County sent electronic ballot links to 2,687 UOCAVA voters on Sept. 20. Of those, 257 recipients had opened the link, and potentially saw the misspelled name by the time the error was discovered on Sept. 21. Three of those people had voted and returned their ballots. (More might have printed out the ballots and mailed them back.)

Wendy Sartory Link, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, shows the Tabulation and Opening room during a tour of the new Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections office in West Palm Beach on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Wendy Sartory Link, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, shows the Tabulation and Opening room during a tour of the new Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections office in West Palm Beach on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Anyone clicking on the link after the fix was made, even if they’d previously opened the ballot, gets the correct version, Link said. And the 257 people who’d opened it got a notification about the misspelling.

For perspective on the scope of the error, Palm Beach County sent out 198,000 mail ballots on Friday to voters living in the U.S., dwarfing the number of incorrect UOCAVA ballots. The 257 opened ballots amount to less than two-tenths of 1% of initial mail ballots to Palm Beach County voters.

Broward County uses a different vendor, and no such error was made on its ballots, Scott said. Broward has sent out about 2,700 UOCAVA ballots. On Tuesday, it is mailing 230,000 ballots to voters living in the U.S.

Results delay

The Tim/Tom Walz error came one month after the Aug. 20 primaries and nonpartisan elections, which had a different problem that generated widespread attention.

After polls closed that night, results didn’t show up on county supervisors of elections offices websites throughout most of the state.

The vendor used by almost every Florida county elections office didn’t have enough capacity to handle internet traffic from everyone who wanted to see the results, the vendor, VR Systems, and supervisors of elections said at the time.

It didn’t affect tabulating of votes, which is done by separate equipment and software that elections supervisors said isn’t connected to the internet. Results were available to members of the public — mostly political operatives and news reporters — who were at elections offices (on a screen in Broward and printouts in Palm Beach County).

And results were transmitted, on schedule, to the Florida Secretary of State’s Office, even though the numbers weren’t visible to the people checking county elections office websites, according to Link and Scott, both Democrats, and Secretary of State Cord Byrd, a Republican.

But it raised concerns among some who have grown distrustful of voting, or who seek to raise doubts among the public. A congressional candidate in Palm Beach County suggested that while the results were offline to the public they were somehow manipulated behind the scenes to her disadvantage. That’s impossible, Link said, and there was no evidence of anything untoward.

With elections results not showing on elections offices websites in much of Florida shortly after the polls closed on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024, Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott live streams on Facebook and Instagram the scroll of live results at the Elections Office headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. (Anthony Man/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
With elections results not showing on elections offices websites in much of Florida shortly after the polls closed on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024, Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott live streams on Facebook and Instagram the scroll of live results at the Elections Office headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. (Anthony Man/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Faith in elections

The rush to skeptical judgment by professed skeptics shows how much faith in elections and in the people who run elections has changed. Scott and Link both said they spend lots of time explaining the way voting works, giving tours of their facilities, and reassuring voters.

Broward and Palm Beach counties both opened new elections headquarters this year. The facilities had been long planned, but as expressions of doubt about election have grown louder in some quarters since the 2020 election, both incorporated extensive design features that allow anyone in the public to view the behind-the-scenes work of ballot processing and counting.

Vendors

But the Walz name error and statewide delay in posting results in August raise questions highlighted the elections offices’ reliance on vendors.

It would be prohibitively expensive and logistically nightmarish for each county to replicate every piece of equipment and software on its own. If they did, much of the equipment would sit unused between elections and expensive, specialized employees would have little to do outside election season, Link and Scott said.

“It’s a combination of just capacity, budget, technology, space. For example, one of our vendors that we use is a printer. We’ve got to print all of our ballots. We don’t have a printing press, and it wouldn’t make sense, it wouldn’t make fiscal sense, for us to buy a printing press,” Link said.

Scott’s concerns about one vendor, VR Systems, had been growing even before the company was responsible for the primary night failure in displaying election results. Soon, he said his office’s website won’t be hosted by VR Systems, a transition he said would take place by the Nov. 5 general election. He said the office would still need to get other services from VR.

Link, president-elect of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association, said she and other supervisors who have expressed their concerns VR Systems have been assured by the company that it’s making changes to avoid a repeat in November.

Neither VR Services, responsible for the August error, nor Enhanced Voting, the company responsible for the misspelling, is involved in the most critical feature of elections in Florida: vote tabulation.

There are two companies that have gone through federal and state certification to provide tabulating equipment and software, Elections Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems. Link said a third potential vendor is going through the certification process.

More competition

Scott, who has an extensive technology background, said there are issues with the reliance of all government agencies on outside vendors.

He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he studied computer science. After finishing his service as an Army captain, Scott got an MBA and worked in technology roles for several companies.

Scott would like to see at least two strong options for everything his office needs. He said too few vendors — sometimes just one — offer the different kinds of specialized services required to run all aspects of elections, ranging from voter registration, to mail-ballot requests, to making sure people in different places get the right ballot for their locality, to scanning signatures, to opening ballots, to tabulating results.

With little competition for specialized work, the vendors “become very, very powerful because they almost become a monopoly within a certain area,” Scott said.

“Competition basically keeps everybody honest. It keeps everybody on top of their game. … When they don’t have competition, then it breeds laziness and complacency and that’s when you start to have more mistakes,” Scott said. “If you have that competition, if you have the ability to switch, it’s going to cause people to perform better. People are going to try harder to keep their products and services up to date and operating efficiently so that they don’t lose business, Scott said.

Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which does lots of elections-related work, recommended increased oversight and regulation of vendors and more funding for the offices that run elections.

“This isn’t some huge money-making business for the vendors to get into. The main customer base is going to be elections offices. If you’re making these scanners or these election night reporting systems and things like that, there’s not going to be a lot of other customers for that product.”

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link, left, and Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott. (Taimy Alvarez & Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Taimy Alvarez & Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link, left, and Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott. (Taimy Alvarez & Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Surge in skepticism

Election skepticism isn’t new, but it has greatly intensified recently.

In the early 2000s, there was widespread suspicion after George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 presidential election over Al Gore in Florida — by 537 votes — after five conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the state’s recount. The Florida result secured the presidency for Bush.

Elections systems and laws were changed, with widespread adoption of electronic, touch-screen voting. Many in the public were distrustful of the touch-screen devices, which didn’t produce a paper trail allowing people to know for sure if their votes were being recorded as intended.

Conspiracy theorists, largely on the political left, said the systems were flawed and subjected to hacking that allegedly could manipulate election results. There was never authoritative evidence of touch-screen voting manipulation, but it fell out of favor.

That concern largely died down with the switch to paper ballots — until 2020.

Democrats, who polls showed were more concerned about the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic than Republicans, became much heavier users of voting by mail in 2020. Combined with efforts to make mail voting easier during the pandemic, it prompted Trump to make false claims about mail-ballot fraud.

Even after Trump’s defeat, which he refused to accept, he continued to spread the false narrative that President Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win. Trump and many Republican elected officials have continued asserting that elections are rife with fraud, even though multiple independent examinations — including some led by Republicans — have found there’s no evidence to support the claims.

They have been costly for some. Two big election companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, were falsely accused of manipulating votes in 2020. They sued the conservative media outlets that amplified those claims. Dominion settled its case last year and received $787 million from Fox. On Sept. 26, Smartmatic and Newsmax settled their dispute. The terms weren’t disclosed.

“I definitely think there was a huge turn after the 2020 election to where people are looking for every election-related story, and then there’s immediately some sort of political message attached to it like, ‘See, you know you can’t trust elections because this bad thing happened. Therefore everything with elections is bad,’” Scott said.

Attention to Walz’s misspelled first name fits the pattern, he said. “Of course that is going to end up translating into finding more minor errors. Plus it gets clicks (for websites). It’s great clickbait. A story like that is something that will get people to click on it to learn more about it. So it’s a great way for news organizations to get attention.”

There has been an effect.

“The generalized suspicion I think can be very destructive, as we’ve seen over the past few years, to people’s faith in the overall process,” Ramachandran said. “This is not something that local election officials were used to prior to 2020. And we also consistently get the result that the local election officials at least believe that it’s very tied to false information about elections and misunderstandings of how elections work.”

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.

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