Computer problems raise fears about Florida's election system

By BOB MAHLBURG

Orlando Sentinel

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - In the latest blow to Florida's increasingly embattled election system, state and local officials scrambled Wednesday to try to salvage election records wiped out during a computer crash in the state's biggest county.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent an investigator to Miami-Dade County, and county election officials brought in a university consultant to try to figure out what went wrong when records of the 2002 Democratic primary vote for governor vanished last year.

Coming just months before the 2004 presidential vote in Florida, the incident raised new fears among Republicans and Democrats alike about the electronic voting systems used in 15 counties with more than half of the state's population.

Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jeb. Bush, who oversees Hood's elections office, called the records loss "a great concern," but stressed that the election records were lost from a county computer where they had been transferred, not from voting machines.

"It has nothing to do with the voting equipment," Bratina said. "They'd already been taken off of the voting system."

But others disagreed, saying that older voting systems automatically keep multiple backups of the original data - often in the form of paper ballots - so records are not lost even if numbers in another computer get zapped.

"With my more old-fashioned optical data system, I don't have to worry about that," said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. "We would still have the data - something that is not possible with electronic voting. This gives ammunition to people complaining about the electronic voting system."

Sancho has drawn some criticism for questioning the reliability of new voting technology. Orange County Supervisor Bill Cowles last week criticized Sancho for what he called "unwarranted attacks" on touch-screen technology and Hood said he was "eroding voter confidence."

Amid the latest flap, Bush dispatched his own press secretary, Alia Faraj, to head public relations for Hood's elections office. Faraj served in a similar role for embattled Department of Children & Families Secretary Kathleen Kearney shortly before Kearney resigned under pressure in 2002.

Bratina said the move has nothing to do with election controversies and that Faraj is simply replacing Hood's current communications director, Nicole de Lara, who is leaving at week's end. De Lara, whose family is in Miami and who is getting married, said she is taking a communications post with the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The problems with missing Miami voting data were revealed by the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group that sought information from the tight 2002 governor's primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.

"The audit trail is extremely important because it's like having the black box on an airplane," said Sandy Wayland of the group. "The fact they have these crashes and lose all the data on elections and no one can go back and see what happened is very upsetting."

Bratina said it's "premature to say" if the missing records amount to a violation of state law, which requires them to be maintained. But she said two more investigators are being sent to Miami on Thursday and Hood's office is checking with other counties to make sure they follow the law.

"If people are not preserving records, it's of great concern," Bratina said.

Miami-Dade County elections officials worked with computer experts Wednesday to recover some missing data, but much is still missing, said Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan. He, like state officials, expressed confidence that the 2004 election will be accurate and said the county has since begun daily tape backups.

The missing data comes in the wake of other recent problems, including revelations that touch-screen systems used by 11 counties had a bug that makes a manual recount impossible, the scrapping of a state list of potential felons and other concerns about the accuracy of touch-screen machines.

The ACLU and other groups have called for an independent audit of voting equipment to make sure it works properly and a paper trail in case a recount is needed like the 2000 presidential race.

The coalition again called on Bush to order a statewide study of the August primary election to ensure voting systems work for November's presidential vote.

An independent audit of voting equipment has not been conducted in Florida, and state officials rely on the work of supervisors of elections in each county to check the accuracy of their machines.

But state officials again rejected such calls Wednesday. Bratina said Bush has every confidence in the electronic machines.

"We've had hundreds of elections," she said. "These machines perform well and voters should have confidence in these system."

In addition, state election officials have said technology does not exist to produce paper backups for electronic machines and manual recounts are not needed because machines tell voters if they accidentally missed voting and don't allow them to vote twice.

ACLU of Florida Executive Director Howard Simon said there's also another reason to be upset about losing records of the tight 2002 Democratic vote - it may hold clues to why some votes seemed to disappear.

"The big problem is losing the ability to analyze what may be the major problem with touch screens - the `lost vote' phenomenon," he said. "We might be able to find solutions."

State Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, said he's more comfortable with having paper ballots, as with optical scan machines used by Leon County.

"I'm uncomfortable with where my vote is going into hyperspace," Rivera said. "I just feel more comfortable with a paper record."