Florida still lacks uniform voting system

By Pamela Hasterok
Daytona Beach News Journal
Sunday, January 25, 2004

It is that time again. Chaos! Confusion! Mayhem! Yes, it's a presidential election year in Florida.

Considering the ordeal of 2000, voters could be forgiven if they never entered a polling place again, after being blamed and humiliated for the 36-day deadlock the nation endured before the U.S. Supreme Court chose George W. Bush as president. The state blamed voters, too, trying to pass off its inept and often unconscionable handling of ballots as the fault of those casting the vote.

Volusia County distinguished itself as the first county to undergo a recount. It provided some drama, too, when a poll worker showed up at the Supervisor of Election's office the morning after the election and plunked down a forgotten bag of paper ballots in front of an agog international press corps. The ballots had been counted electronically, the recount matched the original and our county's day in the spotlight quickly faded away.

Not so in South Florida, where hanging chads have given way to the invisible ballot. When the state banned punchcard machines, 15 counties, including Palm Beach and Broward, traded them for the election version of an ATM, touch-screen voting. If interpreting a voter's intent was difficult on a punchcard ballot, just try interpreting it without a ballot at all.

Two weeks ago, Ellyn Bogdanoff won the special election for a Palm Beach-Broward state House seat by 12 votes. The problem is, 137 votes came back blank. That's right. In the only race on the ballot, touch screens registered that 137 people didn't vote for anybody. The losing candidate demanded a recount, but without paper ballots to inspect, both counties declined. The state stayed out of it.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Broward, didn't. He's suing the state to require all counties with touch-screen voting to provide a paper receipt (just like ATMs). No paper ballots means no recount and no recount means the state can't assure an election was won fair and square.

The state's hands-off stance in the House race, allowing each county to decide what to do, worries election experts. In a major contested election say, oh, the presidency, for example - if one county printed touch-screen receipts and another didn't, the state could once again be accused of violating the U.S. Constitution's requirement that all people be treated equally.

In 2000, different counties used different standards to count punch-cardballots, resulting in a hanging chad being counted as a vote in one county and not another. That's expressly what the U.S. Supreme Court said had to stop.

But Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature have done little to right the wrongs of a faulty voting system in time to see that what happened in 2000 never happens again. Lawmakers outlawed punchcard machines and scanning systems that don't tally paper votes at the precinct, the two types of voting machines that disenfranchised the most voters last time. But counties still have different voting systems, different ballots and different methods for assuring a fair election. Voters, in effect, are still being treated differently according to where they live.

That's a scandal. In 2004, the courts, not the ballot box, could once again determine whom Floridians voted for.

Hasterok is a News-Journal columnist. Reach her at pamela.hasterok@news-jrnl.com