Voting troubles may not be over in Fla., elsewhere
By Larry Wheeler, Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — The nation may never see another butterfly ballot or hanging chad from Florida, but the Sunshine State still hasn't fixed its voting system.

Fifteen of Florida's 67 counties now have new touch-screen voting machines. The rest will use optical scanning devices. Both methods are considered more reliable than the old punch-card system, but they aren't without problems.

A programming error in an optical scanning machine caused an erroneous result in Florida's presidential primary election earlier this year.

And touch-screen voting machines have come under fire because they can't produce a paper trail in case a recount is ordered. State and county officials are working on a temporary fix.

Civil rights groups in Florida also are concerned about a potential repeat of the 2000 election mess. They say the state's list of 48,000 ex-felons contains inaccuracies that could cause local election officials to wrongfully purge eligible voters.

"The right to vote is still at stake in Florida's elections," said Courtenay Strickland, coordinator for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, dedicated to protecting and restoring voter rights.

Several lawsuits are pending in Florida seeking changes to protect voter rights, including one filed Wednesday that seeks to reverse a Division of Elections rule that excludes touch-screen ballots from manual recounts.

Florida is one of six states that does not automatically restore the voting rights of felons after they have served their sentences. Just before the 2000 election, Florida officials conducted a purge of voter rolls seeking to exclude convicted felons that caused confusion at the polls and prompted claims of discrimination and disenfranchisement.

Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and state election officials have dismissed criticism of the list as politically motivated.

A report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded Florida blacks were systematically denied the right to vote because of the felon list and other factors.

Some voters are taking steps this year to ensure that their vote is counted.

Laura Fuller, a freelance photographer in Palm Beach County, already has called the county's supervisor of elections to make sure her name is on the list of registered voters. And she plans to call again in September.

In 2000, Fuller, a member of the Green Party, was unable to cast a ballot because her name wasn't on her precinct's list of registered voters. She spent more than two hours dialing into the county's election office but couldn't get through.

She never learned why her name was left off the voting list.

"I was pretty ticked off," Fuller said.

Florida may not be the only trouble spot this fall. Across the country, election officials are dealing with a mounting list of problems.

• California's secretary of state restricted the use of new touch-screen voting machines after computer glitches were discovered.

• Voting machines in Maryland presented some voters with an incorrect list of state primary candidates.

• Election officials in some counties in Iowa have resisted efforts to modernize antiquated voting machines because they don't see a need to change.

After the 2000 election, many states installed new touch-screen voting machines, replacing the old punch-card technology that proved so vexing in the Florida recount.

But about 11% of registered voters — 16 million people — will cast ballots on the old punch-card machines this November, according to a Gannett News Service analysis of information from Election Data Services Inc., a political consulting firm in Washington.

"The 2004 election is in danger," said Kay Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters. "Many of the problems we saw in the 2000 election still have not been fully solved."

President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry are tied in Florida, each pulling the support of 43% of registered voters in the most recent statewide poll by Quinnipiac University Polling Institute of Connecticut.