Did you vote in Miami-Dade or Broward counties for the Presidential Primary, or one of the many local races? If you did, congratulations for doing your civic duty. If you watched the news that night to see the result of your vote on CBS4, the numbers that you saw on the screen were placed there courtesy of volunteers from Gold Coast Mac.

For the second time, GCMac volunteers helped crunch the numbers for CBS4 News, accessing the election results reported by Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe County elections officials and entering those numbers into the CBS4 computerized election system.

That system actually tabulates votes from all three counties, and across the state, integrates them, and presents them in a format that allows CBS4’s display equipment to place them on the screen.

Viewers on CBS4 and UPN33 were able to keep track of the updated returns via a continuous message, or crawl, placed at the bottom of the screen.

Dave Game shows the finer points of elections returns to volunteers from Gold Coast Mac.

GCMac volunteers Esver Camacho, Andre Perwin, and Jim Bolinger joined other volunteers in working with CBS4 Elections Coordinator Dave Game. An elections center was set up in the CBS4 news conference room, complete with an Airport network, where the volunteers worked in teams to read data from Elections Department computers and enter it into the tabulation software.

“We couldn’t have done it without them”, said Game. “I’ve been using volunteers for election tabulations for almost 10 years, and the Gold Coast Mac folks are by far the fastest at data entry, which is the key to success on election night.

CBS4 provided dinner for the volunteers, and a tour of the station following their 5 hour shift.

Two more elections are planned for later this year, a Miami-Dade county election in late August and the November General Election. Game says he will be seeing between 5 to 10 teams of volunteers for those elections, and would love to have more GCMac volunteers. He will be contacting members with an invitation as election time draws closer.

April 2004