4 years later, new election controversies dog Florida

By Mike Williams
Cox News Service
Thursday, July 22, 2004

COCOA BEACH, Fla. — After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, Florida's top politicians and elections officials vowed it would never happen again.

They rammed through sweeping changes in election laws and poured more than $130 million into purchasing new voting machines, retraining poll workers and designing voter-education drives.

But with another too-close-to-call presidential contest just over three months away, controversy is once again swirling in the Sunshine State like a blizzard of paper chads from punch-card ballots.

A state-mandated effort to purge voter lists of felons has been scrapped amid a swirl of charges of incompetence and political favoritism, while the new touch-screen voting machines hailed as the answer to the ballot controversies of 2000 are drawing fire.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has called for a federal investigation of the felon purge list, while one of the state's Democratic senators wants an audit of the voting machines.

"I don't think any state will have a 100 percent problem-free election," said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa and longtime observer of Florida politics. "But if there is a problem in Florida, it gets magnified into one the size of the universe."

The scrutiny that began in November 2000 has eased, but never really gone away.

Widespread problems with the Florida tally prompted a five-week drama that only ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision resulting in a razor-thin victory for George W. Bush. Florida's woes with registration lists, absentee ballots, recounts and the infamous "hanging chads" made the state the butt of jokes by late-night television comedians, but a source of worry for scholars.

Four years later, Gov. Jeb Bush — the president's brother — claims reforms pushed through the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2001 are transforming Florida into a "model" for how to hold flawless, fair elections. He also says that some of the current criticism ignores the progress in an effort to stir up more controversy.

"Our number one goal is to have integrity in our elections, to have a smooth and fair elections process," a Bush spokeswoman told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune last week. "There are people out there who have an agenda, and that agenda includes eroding confidence in Florida's elections."

Bush's press office did not respond to a request for further comment for this story.

But plenty of people don't agree with Bush, saying Florida is on the verge of "being the next Florida," a reference to the problems of 2000.

"I'm not confident the state has done enough," said Bobbie Brinegar, president of the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County, which has joined a nonpartisan coalition in calling for a full-scale audit of the upcoming August primaries in order to "battle-test" the touch-screen voting machines. "The governor is saying, 'Trust us,' and we're saying that's not good enough. The stakes are too high."

Only 15 of Florida's 67 counties will be using the new touch-screen machines this fall; the rest will use optical scanning machines. Critics say the touch-screen system creates no paper record that could be used in the event of a recount, while press reports say investigations have found the computer screens are less accurate than the optical scanning devices.

The touch screens "are faith-based voting," said Lida Rodriquez-Taseff, chairperson of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizens group that has been pressing for reforms. "There is no assurance votes actually cast are counted. We want the machines tested in real conditions, not in some lab hidden from view."

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, called Monday for the U.S. Justice Department to audit the machines, saying in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft that "we need to act now while there's still time to ensure this fall's ballots will be counted accurately and fairly.

"The public clearly has doubt that their votes are going to be accurately recorded by these touch-screen machines," Nelson added.

Florida's chief elections official is the secretary of state, a post now held by former Orlando Mayor Glenda Hood. Her spokesperson, Nicole de Lara, said the audits aren't necessary.

"These machines have been in place for two years and have delivered secure and accurate results in hundreds of elections," she said. "There are elections in Florida nearly every week on the county and municipal levels."

But Hood, a Republican with close ties to the Bush family, has become a lightning rod for the latest round of criticism. She replaced Katherine Harris, a Republican who became a central figure in the 2000 controversy and since won a seat in Congress. After a change in Florida law, the post became appointive and Bush named Hood in 2003.

The biggest flare-up has been over the felon list. Florida is one of only seven states that ban felons from voting, although the state allows those who have served their prison terms to apply for reinstatement of their civil rights.

Hood's office contracted with a private firm to compile the list, which was kept secret under state law until lawsuits by several groups resulted in its public release. Newspaper analyses following the release showed the list of 48,000 suspected felons contained flaws that made African-Americans, a traditionally Democratic bloc, much more likely to be excluded from voting, while only tiny numbers of Hispanics, who have generally supported Republican candidates in Florida, were on the list.

A Miami Herald study found that about 2,000 felons who had gotten their right to vote restored were still on the banned list, many of them African-American Democrats.

After defending the list for weeks, Hood scrapped it, leaving the task of excluding felons up to each county's supervisor of elections.

"The felon purge list problems indicate an all-too-ready willingness to disenfranchise people," Rodriquez-Taseff said.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission blasted the list in a hearing last week in Washington, calling for a Justice Department investigation into whether it was a deliberate attempt to block some voters from casting ballots.

Hood's office has since agreed to enter mediation over the list with the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based legal group that has been a vocal critic.

Hood's spokeswoman said the errors in the list were not deliberate, but instead the result of compiling information from different state agencies, which use different categories for identifying the felons.

Hood "has requested an investigation into how it wasn't found out about until now," de Lara said, noting the secretary remains "confident it was unintentional and unforeseen."

Around the state, though, many remain uneasy about the coming election. President Bush and Democratic contender John Kerry are locked in a virtual dead heat in most opinion polls, prompting concerns that Florida might go through another embarrassing election-night meltdown.

"It looks like Florida may be a nail-biter again," MacManus said. "Unfortunately, technological change hardly ever occurs error-free, whether it's cars or voting machines. But the stakes are much higher with voting machines."