What will Florida do for an encore?

Sunday, March 28, 2004
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Something like 100 million Americans will attempt to participate in a presidential election again Nov. 2, roughly a quarter of them voting electronically on touch-screen systems that have the potential to make the great electoral fiasco of 2000 look like a scrupulously efficient night of church bingo.

This isn't necessarily anyone's fault, according to Dr. Richard Valelly of Swarthmore College, a Harvard-trained political scientist who is expert in American party politics and elections.

"In our elections, we don't count everything well," he told me on the phone last week. "We have a lot of error. We've tried to fix it with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which created a deadline and put a lot of pressure on state Secretaries of State and state election commissions.

"They liked touch-screen voting because people were already using it on automatic teller machines. Since you don't have to handle a lot of different forms, they looked at the machines and said, 'Oh, great stuff.' "

And, of course, they were wrong.

"Diebold [the noted ATM maker] obviously rushed the machines through," Valelly said. "Just put together poorly designed machines, and that's typical when anyone's under pressure, particularly when there are something like $3 billion worth of government contracts available. They were moving fast to make sales."

Diebold did not manufacture all the machines in play for this election, but more than enough to make paranoids on the left point out that it's curious there's no paper trail associated with Diebold's voting machines, even as just about every other machine Diebold makes mostly ATMs and ticket-dispensing machines has its transactions verified on paper. They also like to make the point that Diebold's CEO, Wally O'Dell, is one of George Bush's most decorated political operatives, having attended an exclusive Crawford ranch confab for "pioneers and rangers," people who have raised at least $100,000 for Bush's campaign.

This month in Florida, Super Tuesday results in Bay County at one point showed Richard Gephardt beating John Kerry by better than 2-to-1, which looked a little suspicious inasmuch as Gephardt had pulled out of the race a month before. This happened, according to The New York Times, hours after Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood (Katherine Harris' successor) appeared on CNN, chortling that Florida's system was not only immune from the irregularities of 2000 but also was "the very best" and that "it's a great disservice to create the feeling that there's a problem when there is not."

In a January election in Palm Beach and Broward counties, the Times reported, the victory margin was 12 votes, but machines recorded 130 blank ballots. When a Times editorial writer ped in on a precinct to ask about malfunctioning machines, officials called the police.

Oh yeah, it's "all systems go" down there.

For all that, Valelly doesn't think we're headed toward Election Nightmare II, but only because he thinks this particular election won't be close enough for the inevitable screw-ups to make a difference.

"In 2000, what we had was the perfect storm," he said. "The candidates fought in one state [Florida] very, very hard, and the likelihood that the campaigns are going to deadlock each other leading to questions about the voting is really unlikely."

Valelly thinks, it so happens, that based on his projections, Bush will win comfortably.

"That's not necessarily my desired outcome. Kerry can still win, but it's more likely that Bush will win and that it will not be close. I don't think he's going to lose Florida. But having said that, because of 2000, in 2004 there will be a very heightened level of poll watching, particularly in Florida and other battleground states. Any mistake will get reported, and what you could see is either a lot of commentary or a lot of litigation."

The seven months that separate us from that night could, obviously, turn the election inside-out seven times, and as Valelly notes, the more explosive issues relating to the Help America Vote Act are unrelated to machines. They have to do with "ballot security" and "provisional balloting," or how local election officials will interpret HAVA to handle situations where people show up to vote and their registrations can't or won't be validated.

"When you talk about a train wreck," Valelly said, "that's a potential train wreck of some magnitude."

No wonder hundreds of foreign journalists will be out in force that night to show how America, which is great at instructing the world on how to stage legitimate elections, struggles to legitimize its own.