LePore dodges vote of confidence

By Joel Engelhardt, Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer
Tuesday, March 23, 2004

If Florida finds itself this November in a 2000-style election brawl, the public could be denied one of its most precious civic possessions: the right to inspect the ballots.

Blame it on the newfangled electronic voting machines. Blame it on the state. Blame it on 2000.

Whatever the cause, one of the only ways to assure confidence in the system is in danger of being stamped out. Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, who emerged from 2000 as perhaps America's best-known elections official, said she doesn't have to provide ballots for public review. Ms. LePore, seeking reelection to a third term, said she's following the advice from the Florida Division of Elections. The division says it has passed the matter to the Florida Attorney General's Office, which has had the question since December but has yet to rule.

Ms. LePore says providing the ballots would be too onerous. She knows onerous from 2000. But fishing through 5,000 voting machine cartridges to find the sought-after ballots, plugging them in and producing something the public could inspect doesn't compare to the hardship of hand-counting 460,000 punch cards.

In fact, Florida law gives Ms. LePore no way out. It says, "The official ballots... shall be open for public inspection... at any reasonable time." It doesn't exclude electronic ballots. Why didn't state officials think of that before approving touch-screen systems now in place in 15 counties, including Palm Beach and Martin?

Instead, the public is told to trust the new machines. Voter fear explains U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler's lawsuit to require a paper trail. Voter fear explains the demand for a paper trail in full-page newspaper ads bought by The Computer Ate My Vote Campaign, led by ice-cream magnate Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's.

Though the Diebold touch-screen system was rejected in Florida, it is providing Maryland and Georgia voters with questionable software and hackable transmission of results over phone lines. The doubts raised by Diebold alone should be enough to prod Ms. LePore into releasing the ballots. She dismisses those concerns by referring to a survey showing that Americans have more confidence in electronic voting than in the most common alternative fill-in-the-oval optical-scan balloting, which St. Lucie County uses.

In every election, voters are told about mysterious blank ballots cast, even when there's only one race on the ballot. These votes can't be seen. The public is expected to believe that you can make people go to the polls, but you can't make them vote.

Ms. LePore offers speculation voters want to keep up their perfect attendance record and little else to explain the discrepancy. She falls back on the ministerial functions of her office, which means doing as she's told by Tallahassee, rather than fighting for the public.

It wouldn't take much. Ms. LePore could buttress her opposition to a paper trail by turning to the evidence she controls: the ballots no one is allowed to see.

Take the March 9 Atlantis election. With three contested races and a presidential primary, the village's 820 voters had plenty of choices. Some did not vote in all the races; not a big surprise in a small-town election. Examining the ballots with blanks may show that those voters made ions in the other races, confirming Ms. LePore's theory that they are just exercising their right not to choose. Or it may show what many fear that people are leaving the ballot booth without casting any votes at all, a pointed indictment of the touch-screen machine.

No one knows, because Ms. LePore refuses to produce the ballots.

She's worried about overstepping guidelines imposed by the state. "That's what got me in trouble in 2000," she said. Her go-it-alone approach produced the confusing butterfly ballot. A Palm Beach Post ballot review confirmed the confusion: More than 5,000 Palm Beach County voters threw away their vote, punching both Al Gore and Pat Buchanan. Ms. LePore didn't like what those results showed: that her ballot cost Al Gore the presidency.

In 2000, her excuse was human error. It's never the elections office. It's never the ballot. It's never the machine.

She's missing the point. Voters may be confused by touch-screen machines. She works hard to let voters practice at shopping centers, festival booths and clubhouses. She could work harder to make sure voters have the answers from the most reliable database available: the ballots.