The AP enlightens with Poor Training, Glitches Factored in Miami-Dade Election Fiasco:
Eleven other Florida counties had the same kind of touchscreen voting machines used in Miami-Dade. They were being operated by similar crews of mainly elderly volunteers who had worked low-tech elections for years.Oh yeah, Janet Reno says this is all Jeb Bush's fault.
So why did Tuesday's primary go so well in those places and so miserably here?
For starters, those other counties trained their poll workers up to three times longer than Miami-Dade. Some made sure volunteers could read the English instructions. Most had their machines longer then Miami-Dade did, and they didn't experience the same cascade of last-minute technical glitches that faced the state's most populous county.
...
Retiree Jack Wile said he trained with some 40 others on the new iVotronic machines for about four hours. He has a computer and understood the instructions but says only about four people in the class who seemed to grasp the nuances of the system.
"The rest of the people who were in the class were in a fog," said Wile, an assistant precinct clerk. "Some of them couldn't even figure out where to sign the sheet to show that they took the class."
Precinct clerk Dorothy Walton, who has been working polls since 1973, said she came away from training without knowing exactly how to close out the machines at day's end. She said she didn't ask questions because she was supposed to have a helper who did know.
The helper didn't show up Tuesday.
Workers in Pasco and Sarasota counties got 12 hours of training, and Sarasota County required them to pass a written test. But in Miami-Dade, where the ballots were in English, Spanish and Creole, workers weren't even required to prove basic literacy.
