No, Palm Beach County, you're not in some "Groundhog Day" remake. You're slap in the middle of Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher's time warp.
Happens every two years. Another election, another shot at jumping on that carnival ride through the Bucheristic House of Horrors.
What is it with Palm Beach County and elections? Ever since 2000, when Theresa LePore immortalized the place with the butterfly ballot, PBC supervisors of elections have made gumming up election nights a cottage industry.
It's a curse. And it happened again last week after the GOP Presidential Preference Primary, when somebody in the elections office credited Palm Beach County with a whopping 99.89 percent voter turnout. It's right there on the state website -- or was, as of Tuesday night.
Wait a minute! Maybe 99.89 percent is correct. Maybe only 274 of Palm Beach County's 239,471 registered Republican voters sat the primary out. Maybe we've got a new record, a gold standard among civic-minded communities in this democracy of ours.
Do you think?
"We wish," Bucher said Tuesday.
"I have no idea how the state got that number," she told me. "Our turnout in Palm Beach County was 34.79 percent and it's right there on our website."
Chris Cate, communications director of the state Division of Elections, said he knows how the state got that number. "From Palm Beach County," he said. "Individual counties provide those numbers to us."
Bottom line, he said, is that Palm Beach has to get it in and get it right on the state books by noon Sunday: "That's when the election is officially certified."
Granted, this primary election faux pas doesn't rise to the celebrity, let alone the occasion of Madame Butterfly's world-stopping gaffe, or even to the oopsie of Madame B's successor, Arthur Anderson, who in 2006 left a whole race off the Palm Beach County ballot.
But it's still par for the course for Democrat Bucher. In 2010, of all 67 counties, Palm Beach was the absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel dead-last in processing its absentee ballots. It made headlines then, too.
Then in November 2010, the final indignity was the discovery a week after the election of 500 unopened absentee ballots in a box at the election tabulation center in Riviera Beach.
What truly is frustrating is the utter dysfunctionality of this vast county department. All day Tuesday the PBC elections office's "please press 6" option to get a live person on the phone wasn't working. Neither would a fax go through. I finally resorted to firing off an email to get Bucher's attention. To her credit, she telephoned back.
I did, incidentally, check the press releases on the county website. I thought maybe the supervisor had distributed an explanation of whatever glitch it was that caused Palm Beach to report a number to the state that was more than 65 percentage points off.
But, no. The press release "bin" was empty. Apparently it almost always is. Said Bucher, "I can count on one hand all the press releases I've written since I've been here. With all the trouble we've had with the media over the years, I don't think we need to find a reason to involve them if we don't have to, do you?"
With all due respect, with or without the press, I don't think the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections office can ever hide from anybody, now or in the future. It's not possible.
I was reminded of that in January when Lester Holt, weekend anchor of NBC Nightly News, co-anchor of the weekend edition of Today and principal anchor of Dateline NBC," was in town to address the Forum Club of Palm Beach. About two minutes into his speech this national celebrity began to credit the Palm Beach County elections office with his rise to success. See for yourself. And when you do, guess who was in the audience taking it all in?
You have to laugh or you'll cry.
Palm Beach is the largest county in the state of Florida, and third in population. It is also -- along the coast, anyway -- the wealthiest, the most sophisticated and arguably the most cultured. Its supervisor of elections office has taken more than enough time since the Election 2000 debacle to pull its socks up and fix the problems that made it a laughingstock around the globe. But apparently it hasn't.
Palm Beach County deserves a whole lot better.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
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