`Fahrenheit 9/11' director promises to document Florida election

BY RAFAEL LORENTE AND BUDDY NEVINS

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

BOSTON - (KRT) - Fahrenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore promised Wednesday to train his cameras on Florida come election day to prevent a repeat of what some Democrats call the stolen election of 2000.

"I am committed, I am coming to Florida," Moore said, to loud cheers from Democrats at the Florida delegation breakfast in Boston. "Together we will guarantee to every Floridian that their vote will be counted this year."

Moore's promise comes amid mounting criticism and concerns about the accuracy of the new touch-screen voting machines that replaced Florida's punch-card ballots and questions about Florida's ability to hold fair elections four years after the debacle of 2000.

President Bush won the election by 537 votes in Florida after a more than a month of recounts and legal wrangling that ended with a Supreme Court decision.

In Boston, Democrats listed a litany of complaints about Florida's election system this year - ranging from criticism of the state's creation of a new potential-felon voter list that contained inaccuracies to concerns about electronic voting machines that do not have paper printouts that can be manually recounted to allegations of voter intimidation in 2000.

In Miami-Dade, Fla., county officials confirmed a report in the New York Times Wednesday that the electronic records of the Democratic gubernatorial primary between Janet Reno and Bill McBride had been largely lost because of two 2003 computer crashes.

And in Tallahassee, Fla., Gov. Jeb Bush took notice and assigned his own press secretary to field the criticism. State elections officials also are headed to Miami-Dade to investigate.

Destroyed in the computer crashes in Miami-Dade were reports containing stored images of the individual votes cast and the logs, which show every event that occurred on the machines from the time they were booted up in the morning of the election to the time they were turned off.

"We're having to fight for our right to vote, number one, and then number two, to have our vote counted like we intended," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in Boston. Nelson recently called for an investigation of the voting machines after a South Florida Sun-Sentinel analysis this month found voters using touch-screen machines were six times more likely to cast flawed ballots than voters using older technology which requires them to make pencil marks on paper ballots.

Nelson said he is concerned that the 15 Florida counties using touch screen machines contain a majority of the state's black voters. If the machines malfunction, it could disenfranchise a large number of those largely Democratic voters, he feared.

Others at the Democratic National Convention were more blunt, complaining that machines were not the only problem in Florida.

"We were the epicenter of the greatest crime in political history in 2000," said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida. "The wrong man has been sleeping in the White House for four years as result of that crime."

Wexler has sued to have the electronic voting machines in Florida equipped with a paper trail. With his suit still in the courts, Wexler acknowledged it is now too late to get paper backups installed in time for November. But the machines can be improved and tested, like Nelson has asked, he said.

Others said that the recent controversy over the state's potential-felon voter list suggested Republicans were trying to disenfranchise African-Americans, who vote predominantly for Democrats.

The list, which the state has now said it will not use, contained more than 47,000 names, but only a few dozen were Hispanics. In Florida, Hispanics tend to vote Republican.

"If there were 61 blacks on that list, would the governor have tried to use it?" said U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch of Florida.

Deutsch, who is running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Graham, got a boost Wednesday from Moore. The filmmaker stopped just short of endorsing Deutsch, but praised him for his courage and stood with him on stage when he spoke to the Florida delegation.

The Bush campaign and Jeb Bush's office dismissed accusations of dirty tricks and attempts at disenfranchisement. They also accused Democrats of trying to suppress the overseas ballots of military personnel in 2000.

"I don't think anyone should ever answer Michael Moore seriously," said Reed Dickens, a Bush campaign spokesman. "We hope and pray that Democrats don't try to toss out the ballots of our men and women in uniform like they did last time. We're working hard to make sure that what happened in 2000 doesn't happen again."

U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw of Fort Lauderdale, a Republican, suggested it may be time to require voters to fill out a paper ballot after using an electronic machine as a safeguard.

"I'm generally suspicious of computers," said Shaw, who said he is worried about the reliability of any recount without a paper trail.

"It's like a guy in the doctor's office saying I want a second opinion and the same doctor gives it," Shaw said.

In Miami-Dade, officials scrambled to assure voters the touch-screen machines in that county would work properly in the Aug. 31 statewide primary and Nov. 2 presidential election.

"We lost the audit data, but we now have a backup system in place," said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections office. "We in Florida experienced a dramatic change in how we vote. Like any change it causes issues. We are resolving these issues when they arise."

A Miami-Dade voters group headed by the former chairwoman of the American Civil Liberties Union called for further safeguards to assure votes will be properly counted in November.

But Alia Faraj, who left Bush's office to become the spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, the state's chief election officer, defended the machines Wednesday. Faraj assured voters there was nothing wrong with the ATM-style devices used by about half of Florida's voters.

"We have confidence in the machines," Faraj said. "They have worked flawlessly in countless elections."

Faraj said the state wanted voters "to note that this is a problem with retention of documents. It has nothing to do with the touch screen system of casting votes."

Still, the latest problems with the machines in Miami-Dade County prompted action from Tallahassee. Earlier reports said the Elections Systems & Software machines, also used in Broward, had a flaw in the audit program, used to verify election results. Faraj said the secretary of state's office would send a team of elections experts to Miami-Dade today to examine the procedures the county uses to operate the electronic machines.

The loss of the election data was discovered after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, headed by former ACLU chairwoman Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, asked to examine it. Rodriguez-Taseff said the group wanted to see if the touch-screen machines operated properly in the 2002 primary.

"One of the things we now need to worry about is if we can't verify how the machines worked in the last election, how do we know how they'll work in the future," Rodriguez-Taseff said.

Democrats and Republicans alike are preparing teams of lawyers and volunteers to monitor November's election and challenge anything they see as improper.

"We have lawyers from Pensacola to Key West," said Steven Zack, a Miami attorney leading Kerry's legal team in Florida. "We've assembled to make sure that every vote counts."

Joining Zack's legal team will be other independent observers as well as Moore's cameras. Moore said he plans to show up in the state in October and stay through the election.

"I really want Jeb Bush to know that the majority of Americans really resent doing things that would deny the right to vote to registered voters in the state of Florida," Moore said.

But in spite of his plan, Moore acknowledged he will have, at best, three cameras in Florida. That means this year's election results could once again end up in court.

"If we have a close election in Florida both sides will be in federal court on election night," Wexler said.

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