White House invite leads to voting critique

 

Well, it's official.
Ion Sancho is now "Mr. Leon County Elections." And he's not just a legend in his own mind.
The elections official has been no shrinking violet when it comes to opining for the national media. Now he gets an even higher endorsement - that of President George W. Bush.
A letter sent to Sancho's office in the Leon County Courthouse invites Mr. Leon County Elections to dinner at the White House on July 21 to celebrate the president's first term in office. First Lady Laura Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and all the other muckety-mucks will be there, and the president hopes Mr. Elections can make it, too.

Computer stupidity

Sancho made a blow-up of the letter and displayed it to the Capital Tiger Bay Club this week as an example of what can go wrong when people rely too heavily on technology.

Obviously, he said, no human eye ever proofread the computer-generated letter. Had someone seen it, Sancho surmised, they would have known immediately that Mr. Elections was an unlikely dinner guest.

One wonders whether the president meant to invite Sancho to dinner at all. A long-time Democrat, Sancho formally registered "No Party Affiliation" last year after lawmakers failed to take the advice of an election-reform task force and elections supervisors themselves to make their office nonpartisan.

Sancho points to such computer stupidity as cause for concern in two areas of state-sanctioned election processes: the purging of possible felons from the voter rolls and the use of touch-screen balloting equipment that leaves no paper trail.

An advocate of paper ballots that can be optically scanned, Sancho says the state could have saved millions and had far less controversy about the security of electronic ballots had it just opted for opti-scan instead of the touch-screen systems.

Telling the world

Sancho has told CNN, ABC, NPR, Vanity Fair, the federal commission looking at election problems and anyone else who will listen that Leon County's near-perfect performance in the 2000 election proves that the opti-scan technology is as good as it gets.

But Raymond Malloy, Sancho's opponent in this year's supervisor race, thinks "sometimes a person can get mired in old ideas."

Some members of the Florida State Association of Elections Supervisors are also quick to point out that Sancho doesn't speak for the association on this issue. Supervisors in the state's largest counties love the touch screens because they save tremendously on the cost of paper and can be adapted to many languages with little fuss.

But the recent security concerns about the touch-screen systems coming out of Silicon Valley - hardly a place where people get mired in old ideas - are worth contemplating. Perish the thought that someone would try to fix a Florida election, but who knows what's going on inside those black boxes? Heaven knows the stakes are high enough to make nefarious acts tempting.

Should we be at least a little wary? Or, in the words of another president, "trust but verify"?

Mr. Leon County Elections thinks so.