Tallying the supervisors

Palm Beach Post Editorial
Saturday, February 7, 2004
Pam Iorio, the former Hillsborough County elections supervisor who last year was elected Tampa's mayor, is correct that the public "has a different take of what they're going to accept and not accept" in the wake of the 2000 presidential election debacle. With her former colleagues increasingly hanging up more than their chads, however, the public will only further question the integrity of their increasingly electronic voting systems.

More than a quarter of Florida's county elections supervisors who served in November 2000 or 18 of 67 have left office. Turnover in the largest counties nationally also has been unusually high. By one expert's count, at least 20 top elections administrators have left office since the last presidential election. The retiring administrators have downplayed the fallout from that election as a major factor, but voters' new awareness and rising expectations clearly have made the work more stressful.

The public is caught between the warnings from computer experts about the scenarios for digital hanging chads and the faith that elections officials say they have in the new technology. Those 67 counties use one of two touch-screen brands or optical scanners. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood says, "We have a system that is worthy of public confidence."

Elections officials, meanwhile, have jobs that suddenly have become more complex and demanding. With their reputations at stake, they must trust the makers and certifiers of new voting equipment. To help replace its antiquated machines, Florida is receiving $133 million in federal Help America Vote Act money, including $85 million from this year's budget and $48 million in newly released money from last year.

Electronic voting was supposed to solve all those butterfly ballot and hanging-chad problems. But despite having new touch-screen voting machines, the Jan. 6 special election for a Broward-Palm Beach County state House seat showed 137 under-votes ballots on which no vote was recorded. This week, the Palm Beach County Commission voted to buy printers that might back up the machine count.

Among other potential problems, cited at the nonpartisan www.verifiedvoting.org Web site, it was three days after the November 2002 election in Bernalillo County, N.M., that a Sequoia machine's Microsoft software problem that was deleting 25 percent of early votes was noticed and fixed. The San Jose Mercury News reported Sunday that in Riverside County, Calif., during the 2000 presidential election, a computer from Sequoia began ping touch-screen ballots from the vote tally. A Sequoia salesman was on hand and intervened to solve the problem. But what happens when one is not?

Theresa LePore came up through the ranks of Palm Beach County's system, but fixing a problem with one of the machines or printers won't be like fixing a flat or getting under the hood to change a broken belt. The turn to high-tech voting resulted from an election that revealed to Americans just how many votes were routinely not counted until the presidency depended on an accurate, complete count. There is deserved new scrutiny of the people who run elections from a less accepting public.