In the aftermath of a botched local vote, Palm Beach County's supervisor of elections is looking at a tough re-election run of her own.
Susan Bucher is feeling heat from the Republican Party and a Democratic rival who announced he would challenge her for the job this fall.
"There's a profound lack of confidence on our side that goes beyond the Wellington elections. People on my Republican Executive Committee are absolutely convinced Susan has a political agenda for this November," said Palm Beach County GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein.
Reciting a string of snafus at the election office, Delray Beach Mayor Woodie McDuffie filed to run against Bucher, a fellow Democrat, for the nonpartisan position.
McDuffie, who heads the information technology department at the county property appraiser's office, said, "We simply do not tolerate errors in our final product."
"If that happened here, I'd expect to be gone the next day," McDuffie said of the computer glitch that scrambled the Wellington election results earlier this month, initially declaring the wrong winners.
Bucher's political challenges threaten to become legal ones, as court complaints have been filed to block the swearing-in of Wellington's winning candidates.
The injunction-seeking complaints allege an "unauthorized recount and other unlawful voting procedures."
Bucher, who declined to comment on the circuit court complaints, blamed malfunctioning computer software from Dominion Voting Services for the electoral hiccup. She said the Colorado-based company is addressing the problem and testing a new version of the software.
McDuffie says that's not good enough.
"She's relying on a vendor to manage her shop. If I were running it, I could tell her something and she would have no idea if I was telling her the truth or not.
"There are so many buzzwords in the IT industry. People can blow sunshine up someone's skirt all day ... until a product goes bad," he said.
McDuffie said that as IT manager, he oversees a database of 750,000 personal property accounts, "doing billions of calculations every time we run."
"We test everything very, very thoroughly. Every time we make changes, we push those out to the test people and challenge them to break it, to make it fail.
"When they can't, we do more checks to assure ourselves we're there," he said. "There is no room for error."
Dinerstein said McDuffie, who is term-limited as mayor, could be a formidable opponent to Bucher, and may short-circuit any prospect of Republican challenge in the Democratic-leaning county.
"If it was one on one, we'd have a better chance than one on two," Dinerstein said. "McDuffie has support from the business community and moderate Democrats, the people we would need to win an election."
Bucher isn't backing down. She told Sunshine State News she still intends to seek re-election, even amid continued complaints and mockery over her office's performance.
In a statement issued this week, Bucher said, "Technology fails and that is why we have safeguards and procedures in place that provide assurances that every vote is counted accurately."
She said that her office was "not made aware of the software shortcomings" that led to the mix-up at Wellington.
Dominion said "the incorrect reporting of vote totals was caused by a mismatch between the software which generates the paper ballot and the central tally system. This synchronization difficulty is a shortcoming of the version of software currently being used by Palm Beach County.
"That shortcoming has been addressed in a subsequent version of the software," the company assured.
Bucher said her office has "already contracted with Dominion Voting to purchase the needed software upgrade once it has been certified by the state."
McDuffie says he's personally experienced what he sees as the shortcomings of Bucher's operation.
"In my mayor's run in 2009, we waited from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. on election night, and the only thing that showed up was absentee ballots," he recalled.
"Then, at 11:03, it went to 100 percent of returns. And there were only 6,000 votes cast. You just have to shake your head."
Under Bucher and her Democratic predecessors, Palm Beach County has been chronically late in completing vote tallies, even finishing behind more populous counties such as Broward and Miami-Dade.
Bucher is now reaching out to Dinerstein, inviting GOP representatives to her office to discuss their concerns.
Dinerstein hopes the next meeting, yet to be scheduled, goes better than the one that two of his board members held with Bucher before the Wellington election.
"They came back from that meeting paranoid. We need to make sure everyone gets a fair shake," Dinerstein said.
Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
