The Broward County elections office is missing 18 new touch-screen voting machines worth $3,000 each because of poor record-keeping before the flawed Sept. 10 primary, the new elections chief said Wednesday.

"We don't know where they are. I don't think anyone does at this point," said Joseph Cotter, who was hired to fix the problems highlighted by the chaotic primary.

The missing machines were not used in the election. They were part of Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant's outreach program and presumably were used to educate voters on how to cast ballots on the ATM-like devices.

But Oliphant had no system to track the machines, Cotter said.

"This is very serious," Cotter said. "This is $54,000 in taxpayers' money that we can't find. . . . No records, or very inadequate records, were apparently maintained of who took the machines from the warehouse and where they were going."

County commissioners, already reeling from the elections office's budget deficit and the missteps surrounding the primary, were disturbed to hear about the latest problem. They paid $17.2 million for the machinery last winter to replace the old punch-card ballots and said they would hold Oliphant accountable for the lost equipment.

"Every day there is another surprise," Commissioner Kristin Jacobs said. "I just look forward for this election to be over, so we can regroup and start fresh."

Cotter predicted that the machines would be found "in somebody's trunk or someplace's closet."

The touch-screen machines were handled more loosely than the booths used for the old punch-card ballots. Cotter said he could not remember losing one of the booths in the two decades he worked for Oliphant's predecessor, Jane Carroll.

Officials for the county and Election Systems & Software, the machines' manufacturer, said the machines would be of little value to anyone who finds them.

Each machine consists mainly of the touch screen and three small hard-drives used to store votes. Most of the technology involved is kept on separate hand-held activation devices.

Because their value is largely limited to voting, Cotter thinks the machines have been misplaced.