[Mb-civic] NYTimes Article: Election Troubles Already Descending on Florida

[Ian]

Surprise, surprise...

Peace.

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 Election Troubles Already Descending on Florida

July 15, 2004
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, July 14 - Three years after Gov. Jeb Bush announced a new voting
system that he called "a model for the rest of the nation," Florida is
grappling with some of the same problems that threw the 2000 presidential
election into chaos, as well as new ones that critics say could cause even
more confusion this November.

 The touch-screen voting machines intended to cure many of the ills of 2000
have raised a host of other concerns here just four months before the
election. A new state rule excludes the machines from manual recounts, and
the integrity of the machines was questioned after a problem was discovered
in the audit process of some of them. Voting rights groups filed a lawsuit
last week challenging the recount ban, and a Democratic congressman has also
sued to request a printed record of every touch-screen vote.

The controversy over the new equipment is just one of Florida's challenges,
which also include confirming which voters are ineligible, training poll
workers on new
policies and processing a flood of new registrations.

State officials announced on Saturday that they would throw out a
controversial list used to remove felons from the voting rolls,
acknowledging that Hispanic felons were absent from the list. Secretary of
State Glenda E. Hood, appointed by Governor Bush last year, had earlier
dismissed concerns from lawmakers and advocacy groups about the list of
48,000 suspected felons, which the state made public only after a judge's
order.

 The United States Civil Rights Commission, which issued a scathing report
on the last election here in 2001, will examine problems with the list of
felons in a hearing
Thursday in Washington.

"The most important thing is to really show the voters that there are
reasons to have confidence in these systems," said Bobbie Brinegar,
president of the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County. "But the
mantra has been 'trust us.' And that is not good enough."

 Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Governor Bush, said the governor was
"taking full responsibility" for the problem with the list, adding: "His No.
1 priority is to have a seamless election and an election where people have
confidence that their vote will be counted."

 The state, whose 36-day recount after the 2000 election stunned and divided
the nation, is expected to be a major battleground again this year, with
President Bush (the governor's brother) and Senator John Kerry, his probable
Democratic opponent, fighting fiercely for its 27 electoral votes. Mr. Bush
won Florida by 537 votes last time, but thousands of votes were discarded
because of voter error on poorly designed ballots and other problems.

 The Republican-led Legislature quickly passed an overhaul of the voting
system in 2001, banning the punch-card ballots that caused so much trouble
in 2000, giving counties money for new voting equipment and setting recount
guidelines. It adopted two-thirds of the recommendations from a bipartisan
task force that Governor Bush appointed after the 2000 election, but stayed
away from some of the more contentious issues.

 Most notably, lawmakers passed over recommendations to make the positions
of county elections supervisors nonpartisan and to review the state's policy
of permanently stripping felons of voting rights. The package that the
Legislature adopted has played a role in the new turmoil. Tucked into the
law was a provision keeping registration records secret. A state judge
struck it down on July 2, opening the way for a close examination of the
list of suspected felons to purge from the rolls.

 Newspapers then reported that the list had a simple but glaring flaw: it
guaranteed that no Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican here, would be
purged, while thousands of blacks, who tend to vote Democratic, might be
purged. Governor Bush moved quickly to drop it, but he was too late to avoid
accusations from Democratic lawmakers and groups.  The critics have
denounced the effort to keep the list secret, the touch-screen problems and
other troubles as purposeful efforts by Florida's Republican leadership to
give President Bush an advantage here.

 Unlike her predecessor Katherine Harris, who was co-chairwoman of President
Bush's 2000 campaign in Florida even as she oversaw elections, Ms. Hood has
publicly stayed away from politics. But critics say that Ms. Hood, a
Republican and former Orlando mayor whom Governor Bush appointed, has sown
doubt by dismissing criticism of the electoral system and by not answering
questions sufficiently.

The abrupt resignation of Ed Kast, the state's director of elections, last
month - he said he wanted to pursue other interests - only deepened public
distrust, said Sandy Wayland, a member of the Miami-Dade Election Reform
Coalition.

 While previous secretaries of state were elected, Ms. Hood was the first
appointed by the governor, the result of a 2003 change in the State
Constitution. She reports to Governor Bush, who is therefore more directly
responsible for her office's successes and failures.

 "She is dealing with some really sophisticated, aggressive partisans," said
Lance deHaven-Smith, a political science professor at Florida State
University, speaking of the Jeb Bush administration. "She has been a good
soldier, getting up and saying, 'Everything is fine, not to worry.' And come
to find out, some of the problems that people feared were actually there. "

 The coalition asked Ms. Hood's office last month to allow an independent
review of the touch-screen machines now used by 15 of 67 counties, including
Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. The office said that only counties were
authorized to seek such audits, and told reporters that the request was an
effort to undermine voter confidence.

 Through a public-records request, the coalition obtained e-mail messages
and other documents from Miami-Dade election officials who referred to a
flaw in the
touch-screen equipment's ability to audit election results, a backup way of
recording votes. The e-mail messages date back as far as June 2003.

 Constance Kaplan, the Miami-Dade County elections supervisor, publicly
acknowledged the problem this spring. This month, the company that makes the
machines, Elections Systems and Software, provided software to correct the
flaw, which the county and state say will not affect the machines' accuracy.

 "It is important to note that the anomaly was rare, and all votes were
counted as the anomaly did not affect the vote itself but rather the audit
after," Ms. Hood's office wrote in a statement Tuesday.

 Nicole de Lara, Ms. Hood's communications director, said that Ms. Kaplan's
office had "unfortunately" not alerted Ms. Hood to the problem, and that she
first learned of it from an article in The Daily Business Review in late
May. Some critics suspect that Mr. Kast's resignation was related to the
malfunction, but Mr. Kast said in aninterview it was not.

 Ms. Wayland is among many here who contend that counties like Miami-Dade
and Broward adopted touch-screen technology too soon, swayed by aggressive
lobbyists. The 52 counties that do not use touch-screen equipment use
optical-scan machines, which produce records that can be manually recounted.

 A recent analysis by The Sun-Sentinel found that touch-screen machines in
South Florida failed to record votes eight times more often than
optical-scan machines in
the March presidential primary.

 Nonetheless, Ms. de Lara said touch-screen machines were wholly reliable
for tabulating votes. She added that they would never require a recount
because under state law the only reason for a manual recount is "voter
intent" when a voter makes too many or too few choices. Touch-screen
machines do not allow people to vote for more than one candidate, she said.
And if people do not choose any candidate for a given office, that is their
prerogative, she said.

 The rule says no manual recounts will be conducted when votes are cast by
touch-screen machine.

 The election reform coalition and other groups have also expressed concerns
about a new policy on provisional ballots, used by Floridians if poll
workers cannot verify their registration on the spot. The Legislature
decided that provisional ballots cast outside a voter's home precinct can be
thrown out, which voting-rights groups call unfair.

 Florida is one of several states where people are questioning touch-screen
technology. California's secretary of state, Kevin Shelley, has prohibited
the use of machines from Diebold Election Systems in four counties for the
November election, and has ordered that touch-screen systems bought after
July 1, 2005, produce a paper record that is verifiable by the voter.

 "There's no question in my mind that ultimately there will be paper trails
in every county in Florida," said Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida
Democrat whose
suits challenging paperless voting systems are on appeal. "The only question
is when."