Florida wary on election eve
(wired.com)
Updated: 2004-11-02 09:06

It's been almost four years since the electoral chaos that damageed Florida's reputation like no hurricane ever could.

Following 36 days of recounts and a 537-vote certified victory for George W. Bush, the Florida Legislature passed the largest election reform package in state history. Punch-card ballots were outlawed, statewide standards for recounts were established and new voting technology was certified.

Florida is again a pivotal battleground state in a nationwide race. Is it ready for a second time in the national spotlight? That depends on whom you ask.

"In some ways we're better off just because we are aware of what needs to be taken care of," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a nonpartisan grass-roots group. "But in many ways we are less prepared. In terms of technology, we are worse off."

The coalition formed in 2002 after touch-screen voting made a notorious Florida debut. Tampa attorney Bill McBride narrowly defeated former Attorney General Janet Reno by 4,794 votes, or 0.4 percent of the total vote in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, but the polls opened late, and numerous reports of input errors called the narrow margin of victory into doubt. A few months later, Gov. Jeb Bush beat McBride with a 13-percentage-point landslide in the general election.

Since then, the Reform Coalition has challenged the validity of e-voting and called for better procedures on everything from provisional ballots to early voting. So far, members haven't been impressed.

"We have gone to a system that is easy to use but is cumbersome and difficult to work for poll workers, and the cost of running an election has increased exponentially," Rodriguez-Taseff said.

More than half of Florida voters are expected to vote on touch-screen machines in this election. Many have already done so through early voting, which has security risks of its own. Voters have already complained to poll observers about wrong personal electronic ballots being programmed or wrong selections being registered for president.

Duval County Supervisor of Elections John Stafford resigned on Oct. 18, citing health concerns, but at the same time complaints poured in about minority access to early voting locations in Jacksonville. And national groups like People for the American Way are already complaining about whether too many provisional ballots -- paper votes that may be cast if citizens feel they were wrongly left off the voter rolls -- will be discarded.

The big fear for many election observers remains the performance of the new machines. The subject of several state and federal lawsuits, the rules for recounts on the machines were developed in the last months leading up to Election Day, and many critics say any recount on machines with no paper trail will ultimately be meaningless.

The Florida Department of State argues that election supervisors can handle any controversy thrown at the peninsula this year. Following a lawsuit about recount rules in e-voting counties, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has established rules in case of a contest as close as 2000.

The 2001 reforms in response to the 2000 disaster outlawed punch-card ballots and made it illegal to ever turn away a voter from the polls. The only technologies allowed now are optical-scan ballots, on which voters fill in a bubble on a paper ballot to pick a candidate, or touch-screen machines, where voters use their finger or a stylus to make selections on a screen much like an automatic teller machine.

If the statewide total shows the margin of victory within half of a percent, the machines recompute the data. If the margin is still within a quarter of a percent after that, printouts of every ballot within the jurisdiction of a certain race will be produced and hand-counted.

A four-page memo was also sent out by Division of Elections head Dawn Roberts addressing challenges by individuals that can be handled by poll workers. And unlike in 2000, stricter rules about how a results challenge should be handled have been made law.

"In 2000, the candidates had the option of contesting the election in select counties," said State Department spokeswoman Jenny Nash. "That is not an option anymore. In a statewide election that is close, every county in the state must participate in a recount."

Nash said the gubernatorial primary should not be seen as symptomatic of a problem with the machines, and stresses it was the first time the new technology had been used by election supervisors.

"Since 2002, we have conducted hundreds of successful elections with those machines," she said. "There is literally an election almost every week somewhere in Florida, so this technology has been tested again and again."

Individual canvassing boards were making conflicting rulings around the state during the 2000 recount. In counties with optical-scan ballots, different decisions were made about issues such as incomplete bubbling or the writing in of major candidates. In counties with punch cards, the validity of hanging and dimpled chads was famously debated.

The rules are clearer now, and great efforts have been put into reducing over-votes, instances where ballots are spoiled because voters chose more than one candidate in a race. In counties using optical-scan paper ballots, the votes must be scanned before voters leave so they may be told about any recorded over- or under-votes. The touch-screen machines allow voters to review their recorded choices before casting their vote with the push of a button.

"The state of Florida is using the best available system to date," Nash said. "And we have one of the most rigorous certification processes in the country."

But those electronic machines, sold by Sequoia and Election Systems and Software as a cure to recount woes, have sparked a national controversy for not allowing much of a recount at all. No paper-trail systems are certified in Florida for use with electronic voting machines, and the state has vigorously defended their accuracy. But in the March presidential primary, under-votes (ballots where no selection was made in some races) were reported eight times more often in counties using electronic voting machines than in counties using paper ballots.

While over-votes plagued 2000, many e-voting critics suspect under-votes could cause as many or more problems this go-around. And while mistakes on the butterfly ballot were ultimately traceable to voter error, lost data in the machines could affect votes at random.

But even if there are no major problems, Rodriguez-Taseff said the process hasn't necessarily been repaired. Problems occur even in elections that are not close, she said, but they don't receive so much scrutiny.

But at least publicly, elections officials are optimistic going into Tuesday. If nothing else provides comfort, the law of averages at least suggests it is unlikely that everything will come down to a vote in Florida close enough for a shuffleboard club to swing the results.

"When visiting the early-voting sites, people are not upset and things are running smoothly," Nash said. "I think because of the close numbers before, positive changes have come about."

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