International Election Monitors Take on Florida
Mon Mar 8, 2004 03:38 PM ET
By Michael Peltier

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Reuters) - An international group that usually monitors elections in developing democracies said Monday it would take up posts at Florida precincts in November in hopes of averting another debacle when voters pick the next U.S. president.

Four years after Florida became the object of international ridicule, officials for the Catholic group Pax Christi USA will place monitors from 30 countries at polls in four Florida counties that were at the center of the 2000 U.S. presidential election dispute.

The Washington-based group will ask its international organization to send monitors to Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Duval counties, where voting irregularities kept the outcome of the 2000 presidential race in doubt for more than month.

The national coordinator for Pax Christi USA, Dave Robinson, said Florida's 2000 election woes were symbolic of errors across the United States that disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters.

"Normally, Americans go to developing nations to ensure fair, transparent and free elections," Robinson said.

"We felt it was necessary to bring our friends from other parts of the world to the United States to bear witness in order that we might have a fair transparent and free elections."

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said equating Florida's election system with that of a Third World country was insulting. He also said Florida had put in place machinery and voter education programs that made it a model for the nation.

"This is all part of some politically motivated thing that tries to scare people to somehow think their vote is not going to count," Bush said. "That's hogwash, hogwash."

Florida voters split down the middle in the Nov. 7, 2000, election, spawning court battles over whether and how to count imperfect ballots. The battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and George W. Bush was eventually declared the winner by 537 votes, which put him in the White House.

Florida has banished the balky punchcard ballots that made a household word of "chad," the bits of cardboard dislodged when the cards were punched.

Florida counties now use paper ballots that are penciled in like standardized tests and read via optical scanners, or electronic touch-screen machines similar to automated bank teller machines.

Some counties have had glitches with the latter. U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday asking a judge to order ballot printers that would produce a paper record in the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines. Without them, he said, there is no way to conduct a manual recount.