Tuesday's election seen as test for touch screens

By Jane Musgrave, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2004

Forget that Sen. John Kerry already has been anointed the Democratic presidential nominee.

There is much at stake in Tuesday's presidential primary that has nothing to do with men and everything to do with machines.

Florida's first statewide election in two years is being touted by some as a referendum on electronic voting machines, which were to solve all the problems that led to the 2000 presidential election debacle.

Instead, some politics-watchers argue, the machines created new problems. And, they say, unless the problems are corrected, the results of November's election will be as questionable as those that put George W. Bush in the Oval Office four years earlier.

"We're heading for another election disaster," said Jeffrey Loggia, an attorney who represents U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a vocal touch-screen critic.

Today, Loggia said, he and the Delray Beach Democrat will be back in court challenging the touch-screen system that is used in Palm Beach and 14 other Florida counties as unconstitutional.

"There were problems all over the country with electronic voting on Super Tuesday," Loggia said. "Because of the problems we have no reason to think we're going to be exempt from these problems on Tuesday, in August or in November."

Because the touch-screen systems used here don't provide a paper trail that would allow a manual recount, they violate the U.S. Constitution, he said of the arguments he will raise in the suit that will be filed in federal court.

A similar suit, filed in state court, was thrown out last month.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore and her counterparts throughout the state scoff at Loggia's claims.

"We've had 150 elections on the new equipment," LePore said. "The equipment has been used and used and used without any problems."

However, some dispute her view, pointing to strange results in three elections since the county spent $14.5 million for the touch-screen machines in 2001.

Most recently, eyes were raised in January when tallies showed that 137 people took the time to go to the polls but didn't vote in a special state House election in a district that straddles Palm Beach and Broward counties.

Although no one sued over the January election, which was decided by 12 votes, city council candidates in Wellington and Boca Raton filed separate suits claiming the electronic machines cost them earlier elections.

Wellington candidate Al Paglia, who lost by four votes in an election in which 78 blank votes were cast, ped his suit. Boca Raton candidate Emil Danciu lost his lawsuit, although Circuit Judge John Wessel acknowledged that the touch-screen machines had malfunctioned.

Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said touch-screen machines have malfunctioned all over the country.

"Every time we run these machines, there are these blank ballots and we don't know why," she said.

Mercuri, who served as an expert witness in Danciu's lawsuit, said that if there were paper ballots, the blank votes could be checked and people wouldn't have to speculate as to whether voters went to the polls and simply didn't vote, or something more sinister happened.

"The American public needs to have stronger evidence of the accuracy of elections," agreed David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University. "Anything else where you entrust an institution with something valuable, there is some way to track it. With a bank, you get a bank statement. With voting, you cast your vote into a void and there's no way of checking it."

Like other academics who have studied touch-screen systems, both Mercuri and Dill said they favor optical scan systems, which are used in the 52 Florida counties that don't use touch-screen systems.

The optical scanners are cheaper than touch screens, provide a paper trail and can be equipped with what are called tactile ballots so they can be used by the blind, Mercuri said.

"You guys got snowed," Mercuri said of Palm Beach County's decision to buy touch-screen machines.

LePore countered that there is nothing to fear from touch screens. They can't be manipulated, can't be corrupted and, perhaps most important, they give a voter at least three opportunities to check their votes to assure they don't vote for, say, Pat Buchanan when they mean to vote for Al Gore.

To return to paper ballots would be stepping back in time, said Indian River County Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem, president of the Florida State Association of Elections Supervisors.

"I can't imagine that the voters want us to go back to counting 9.3 million pieces of paper," she said.

And, she said, if touch-screens can be corrupted, so can optical scanners.

Both LePore and Clem said they expect Tuesday's election to go smoothly. "Oh, we might have a few hiccups," Clem said. "We won't have perfect elections until we have perfect poll workers, perfect voters and perfect election officials."

jane_musgrave@pbpost.com