Lawsuit challenges Florida ballot-recount rules
The rule prohibits manual recounting of ballots cast with touch-screen machines

News Story by Jane Sutton

JULY 08, 2004 (REUTERS) - Voter rights groups sued Florida election administrators yesterday to overturn a rule that prohibits the manual recounting of ballots cast with touch-screen machines, a lawsuit with echoes of the state's disputed 2000 presidential election voting.

The lawsuit called the rule "illogical" and said it rests on the questionable assumption that electronic voting machines perform flawlessly 100% of the time. It also said the rule violates a Florida law that expressly requires manual recounts of certain ballots if the margin in an election is less than 0.25% of the votes cast. Court disputes over how to conduct manual recounts of punch-card and absentee ballots delayed Florida's results in the 2000 presidential election, which George W. Bush won after taking the state by 537 votes.

The lawsuit was filed against the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections and which issued the rule in April.

Plaintiffs included the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the nonpartisan political group Common Cause and other voter education and civil rights groups. The suit will be heard by the Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee, the state capital.

The plaintiffs said in their suit that e-voting machines are "known to malfunction and to be subject to malicious tampering."

Fifteen Florida counties containing about half the state's population use touch-screen voting machines. They include the three most populous counties Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach that were at the heart of the 2000 punch-card ballot recount battle.

Florida banned punch-card ballots after 2000, but there have already been glitches with the machines that replaced them in some counties. Audit tests using the new touch-screen machines last year showed that some of the data recorded on the Miami-Dade machines weren't transferred to electronic logs that would need to be reviewed in a recount.

Questions about when election officials learned of the glitch in the tests and whether the flaws can be fixed before the November presidential election have made some voters suspicious. "The experience of Miami-Dade County alone shows that they [the machines] are subject to all kinds of errors. That's precisely why we must have a mechanism in place to recount all of the votes in close elections," said Florida ACLU Executive Director Howard Simon.

About 30% of U.S. voters cast their ballots on electronic voting machines in 2002, according to the Council of State Governments. In California, problems with the machines forced the state to rewrite its electronic voting rules in April and decertify those used in one-third of its polling places (see story).

Officials at the Florida Department of State said they couldn't comment because they hadn't seen the lawsuit.

They have said previously that manual recounts weren't required for the touch-screen machines because the machines don't permit the types of errors that are subject to ballot recounts. Namely, those are "overvotes," where the machines indicate that more than one candidate has been ed, and "undervotes," where the machines indicate that none were ed.

Florida's touch-screen machines don't produce printouts of the ballots. Other lawsuits winding through the courts have sought to require the printouts. Yesterday's lawsuit didn't specifically ask for them, but it said there must be some means of ensuring the integrity of the electronic machines to secure voter confidence.