Palm Beach Election Desperation Part III - 2500 ballots missing now

At the start of the day Thursday, we thought most of several thousand
missing ballots had been located. That's what staff at Palm Beach
County's elections office staff announced Wednesday night. But late
Thursday afternoon, the election canvassing board heard something very
different and troubling.

A count of ballots by hand Thursday tallied 100,002. That figure is
2,521 less than the number of ballots counted after the election.
2,500-- the new number of missing ballots.

Thursday workers from several county departments joined staff from the
Supervisor of Elections office, going through all of the boxes of
ballots at the county's tabulation center. The workers were not
re-counting votes in the judge's race, but simply counting the number of
ballots, hoping to reconcile a discrepancy in ballot totals.

...Late Wednesday night, after reviewing precinct totals from both counts,
elections office staffers told the canvassing board they had "found"
2,700 missing ballots. They were in the boxes of ballots at the
tabulation center. Human error in the recount process, it was believed,
was the likely cause of the difference in ballot totals.

But Thursday's hand count of ballots has, for now, blown that theory out
of the water....

At this point the county is just trying to track down all of the ballots:

Workers spend day counting ballots, not votes 09/04/08

The Palm Beach Post seems to be blaming the county's Information Technology Officer for the lack of a tracking system for handling the recounts. 

See  The flaw that links LePore, Anderson  by Joel Engelhardt Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer Thursday, September 04, 2008

...Is it any surprise that hands-off Arthur Anderson, who stayed out of election day vote-counting because he was on the ballot, has no answers as to why the recount resulted in the impossible: It found 3,478 fewer ballots than from election day. In fact, it found fewer ballots (99,045) than awarded on election day in the sheriff's race (99,593).

There they were, working around the clock last weekend to recount votes in Palm Beach County, and - as in 2000 - no one had set up a mechanism to track the recount.

Back then, the supervisor was Theresa LePore. Now, it's Arthur Anderson. Eight years later, though, one thing has not changed. The supervisor's "information technology" officer, the guy running the machinery of vote-counting in Palm Beach County, is Jeff Darter.

I've heard complaints about Mr. Darter since the 2000 election. Palm Beach County got its two-week recount done two hours late, and Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris famously wouldn't bend the deadline for the Democratic-heavy county.

Ms. Harris complained, correctly, that the results were incomprehensible. That's because no one at the elections office thought to create a simple Excel spreadsheet to track the results in an orderly fashion. In the final hours of the frantic run toward the 5 p.m. Sunday deadline, county employees - not Mr. Darter - hastily fashioned a spreadsheet and input the numbers that Ms. Harris found unfathomable.

Eight years later, Jeff Darter still is in charge of "information technology." And the county canvassing board is still tracking votes without so much as a laptop computer. As the recount wound down after midnight Saturday, County Commissioner Mary McCarty, a canvassing board member, found herself checking her math on a legal pad and later on a calculator.

In his candidate interview with The Post Editorial Board, Dr. Anderson expressed regret for not making personnel changes sooner, a reference to his decision after countless election-night gaffes to keep Mr. Darter in sole charge of election systems. What did canvassing board Chairman Barry Cohen, a county court judge, say to Mr. Darter as the recount started Friday night? "Jeff, don't get sick." If Mr. Darter goes down, there's no one to replace him....