Still uncertain
Our position: County elections supervisors have work to do to make sure the vote is fair.

Posted July 9, 2004

As politicians hit the campaign trail with election-year vigor, Americans have good reason to wonder whether Florida is destined to repeat the balloting debacle that marred the 2000 presidential contest.

It's the job of local elections supervisors to make sure that doesn't happen.

Following the 2000 mess, state lawmakers drastically reformed election laws, did away with the reviled punch-card voting system and allowed Floridians to cast "provisional" ballots if their voting status was unclear.

While a good start, the reforms hardly are the electoral panacea that many once hoped.

Take, for example, the new provisional ballots. In 2000, hundreds of voters, primarily minorities, were inexplicably turned away from the polls and had no recourse. The provisional ballot was developed, in theory, to permit voter participation in an election pending an eligibility review by county election monitors.

Sounds simple enough. But all is not as it may seem.

As the American Civil Liberties Union and others note, a provisional ballot automatically will be discarded if it is filled out in the wrong precinct. And nothing in the law requires poll workers to determine whether someone requesting a provisional ballot had simply gone to the wrong polling place.

That's why it's so important to train poll workers on this matter for this fall. Because the law is silent on the subject, elections supervisors should require that all poll workers check countywide voter-registration rolls before issuing a provisional ballot. That would ensure that voters are where they're supposed to be.

Such checks and balances are particularly important this year now that the state issued a seriously flawed list of potential felons who could be barred from voting. Most elections supervisors are erring on the side of caution, refusing to purge names from the rolls until they're sure an individual is a convicted felon who has not had his or her voting rights restored.

Still, the potential for mistakes looms large because there is no uniform standard to verify qualified voters. The provisional ballots are supposed to be "a safety net" for anyone who might be wrongly eliminated, state election experts say.

But nothing in the new law dictates an appeals process for someone who casts a provisional ballot. Deciding whether that voter was eligible is left up to the county's canvassing board. Certainly, provisional voters should have a chance to prove their case. And supervisors should make sure that happens, setting a date and time to hear provisional-ballot appeals before election results are certified.

If Florida learned anything from the 2000 election debacle, it should be this: In a democracy, no one should be wrongly denied the opportunity to vote.