http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/opinion/14SUN1.html
Florida as the Next
Florida
March
14, 2004
As
Floridians went to the polls last Tuesday, Glenda Hood, Katherine Harris's
successor as secretary of state, assured the nation that Florida's voting
system would not break down this year the way it did in 2000. Florida now has
"the very best" technology available, she declared on CNN. "And
I do feel that it's a great disservice to create the feeling that there's a
problem when there is not." Hours later, results in Bay County showed that
with more than 60 percent of precincts reporting, Richard Gephardt, who long
before had pulled out of the presidential race, was beating John Kerry by two
to one. "I'm devastated," the county's top election official said,
promising a recount of his county's 19,000 votes.
Four
years after Florida made a mockery of American elections,
there is every reason to believe it could happen again. This time, the problems
will most likely be with the electronic voting that has replaced chad-producing punch cards. Some counties, including Bay
County, use paper ballots that are fed into an optical scanner, so a recount is
possible if there are questions. But 15 Florida counties, including Palm Beach,
home of the infamous "butterfly ballot," have adopted touch-screen
machines that do not produce a paper record. If anything goes wrong in these
counties in November, we will be in bad shape.
Florida's
official line is that its machines are so carefully tested, nothing can go wrong.
But things already have gone wrong. In a January election in Palm Beach and
Broward Counties, the victory margin was 12 votes, but the machines recorded
more than 130 blank ballots. It is simply not believable
that 130 people showed up to cast a nonvote, in an
election with only one race on the ballot. The runner-up wanted a recount, but
since the machines do not produce a paper record, there was nothing to recount.
In
2002, in the primary race for governor between Janet Reno and Bill McBride, electronic
voting problems were so widespread they cast doubt on the outcome. Many
Miami-Dade County votes were not counted on election night because machines
were shut down improperly. One precinct with over 1,000 eligible voters
recorded no votes, despite a 33 percent turnout statewide. Election workers
spent days hunting for lost votes, while Floridians waited, in an uncomfortable
replay of 2000, to see whether Mr. McBride's victory margin, which had dwindled
to less than 10,000, would hold up.
This
past Tuesday, even though turnout was minimal, there were problems. Voters were
wrongly given computer cards that let them vote only on local issues, not in
the presidential primary. Machines did not work. And there were, no doubt,
other mishaps that did not come to light because of the stunning lack of
transparency around voting in the state. When a Times editorial writer dropped
in on one Palm Beach precinct where there were reports of malfunctioning
machines, county officials called the police to remove him.
The
biggest danger of electronic voting, however, cannot be seen from the outside.
Computer scientists warn that votes, and whole elections, can be stolen by
rigging the code that runs the machines. The only defense is a paper record of
every vote cast, a "voter-verified paper trail," which can be counted
if the machines' tallies are suspect. Given its history, Florida should be a
leader in requiring paper trails. But election officials, including Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County elections supervisor who was
responsible for the butterfly ballot, have refused to put them in place.
Last
week, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, filed a federal lawsuit
to require paper trails. He relies on the Supreme Court's holding in Bush v.
Gore that equal protection requires states to use comparable recount methods
from county to county. Florida law currently requires a hand recount in close
races. That is possible in most counties, but the 15 that use electronic voting
machines do not produce paper records that can be recounted. Under the logic of
Bush v. Gore, Representative Wexler is right.
After
the 2000 mess, Americans were assured they would not have to live through such
a flawed election again. But Florida has put in place a system, electronic
voting without a paper trail, that threatens once more to produce an outcome
that cannot be trusted. There is still time before the November vote to put
printers in place in the 15 Florida counties that use touch screens. As we
learned four years ago, once the election has been held on bad equipment, it is
too late to make it right.
Copyright
2004 The New York Times Company
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains
copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our
efforts to advance understanding of political, democracy, scientific, and
social justice issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such
copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use
copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond
'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.