In Florida, a Vote of Confidence That Election Debacle Won't Recur
'We've got an excellent system,' says the official who designed the 'butterfly' ballot. But skeptics say electronic machines are flawed.

By John-Thor Dahlburg | Times Staff Writer
Posted July 29, 2004

 WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Way down the Eastern Seaboard from where the Democrats are meeting, the state that broke their collective hearts last time is preparing for another presidential election.

In Palm Beach County, Elections Supervisor Theresa A. LePore, the woman who designed the "butterfly" ballot that helped trigger a constitutional crisis in 2000, isn't worried this time around. She hasn't been watching the convention; the television in her office is tuned to such vintage shows as "Gunsmoke" and "Leave It to Beaver."

"We've got an excellent system, in my opinion," said LePore, 49. But with a smile, the former Democrat acknowledges she wears not one but two good-luck charms these days: a gold horn and a bracelet designed to ward off the evil eye.

"I don't have a clue who will win," LePore said. "But I hope it's by big margins."

President Bush won Florida in 2000 by 537 votes after a long, hotly disputed recount. Florida — with 27 electoral votes — is again key to the strategies of Republicans and Democrats.

The state today looks as polarized as it was in the last presidential election. One newspaper poll this week found a statistical dead heat, with 47% of likely voters in favor of Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, 44% for Bush and 3% for independent Ralph Nader.

Not everyone in Florida is as confident as LePore.

"We are not free of problems," said Daniel A. Smith, professor of political science at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "There are flaws with the electronic voting machines."

And a list used to purge felons from voter rolls was recently shown to contain errors.

The 2000 election in Florida was plagued by disputes in tallying votes and in deciding what constituted valid ballots. The next year, the state adopted sweeping electoral reforms. More than $93 million in state and federal funds was appropriated for new equipment and other measures to prevent future debacles. But problems have recently surfaced.

Palm Beach and other large urban areas — 15 counties in all — have bought state-of-the-art, ATM-like machines to replace the old punch-card ballots. Florida's other 52 counties are using an older but tested method of voting: optical-scan machines, in which circles or ovals on the ballot are colored in by voters, like a college admissions test.

Both methods should guarantee there is no repeat of the abstruse debates of 2000 over how large a hole had to be in a punch-card ballot to indicate a citizen's choice, and what weight, if any, to assign "chads," the bits of paper some Floridians didn't completely dislodge.

But touch-screen machines, it turns out, might not register all votes and might have other technical bugs.

This week, Miami-Dade officials announced that detailed voting records from their county's first full-scale use of touch-screen terminals, the September 2002 gubernatorial primary, had been lost in computer crashes.

"It would be like if paper ballots were destroyed," said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the county elections supervisor. Since December, Kaplan said, election workers have been making daily backups of records on computer tape. "If a similar crash occurred today," he said, "the data would not be lost."

Although the episode did not involve the touch-screen terminals themselves, it confirmed suspicions by some Floridians that the high-tech hardware was far from trouble-free. "Every time they tell you that these systems work, they have been wrong. Why should we trust them now?" said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.

Moreover, a list that was supposed to bar convicted felons from voting, a practice begun in Florida after the Civil War, was found to include the names of more than 2,100 citizens in good standing, many of them African Americans and Democrats. The list was noticeably light on Latinos, who in Florida tend to vote Republican.

After newspapers reported that 47,000 on the list had been excluded from voting, Gov. Jeb Bush's secretary of state, Glenda Hood, ordered it ped. People on the list, where Democrats outnumber Republicans about 3 to 1, are now free to cast ballots, but will be committing a crime if they are felons who have not petitioned to have their rights restored by a state clemency board.

Gov. Bush has called the omission of Latinos from the list an oversight, and accused Democrats of using the issue to mobilize their electorate. A similar purge of the rolls before the 2000 election barred thousands of Floridians who should have been able to vote from doing so. Most were Democrats.

"I think we may have more problems than we had before," said Lance deHaven-Smith, professor of public administration and policy at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

When Gov. Bush signed the Florida Election Reform Act in May 2001, he vowed that his state's election machinery would be transformed from international laughingstock to the "envy of the nation." The act also allocated money for voter education and set standards for recounts.

Changes in Florida's Constitution have also taken elections out of the hands of an elected secretary of state. Republican Katherine Harris, co-chairwoman of the Bush presidential campaign, held the job in 2000 and was accused of blatant partisanship by Democrats. Last year, the post became an appointed one.

On Nov. 2, the governor is counting on a "smooth, seamless election," said Jill Bratina, Bush's communications director.

Added Joseph Agostini, a spokesman for the state Republican Party: "The process in place is fair and accurate."

Many factors contributed to Florida's chaos in the 2000 contest: confusingly designed ballots that led some voters to opt for the wrong candidate or more than one, large numbers of first-time voters, the presence of third-party candidates. Some Democrats accused Gov. Bush of rigging his brother's victory, and suspect that Republicans are plotting more election day larceny.

"Let me tell you what I'm afraid of: another stolen election and four more years of the Bush administration," U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown told her colleagues in the House of Representatives this month. Brown, a Democrat from Jacksonville, where 27,000 ballots, mostly in black precincts, were voided because of irregularities in 2000, called on the United Nations to dispatch election monitors to Florida.

In a letter to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Ralph G. Neas, president of the voters rights group People for the American Way, asked for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Florida officials for possible civil rights violations. "Three years after the 2000 election debacle in Florida, and just four months before the 2004 elections, chaos and confusion still reign," Neas said in testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington this month.

LePore said she believed Florida, and her jurisdiction, were being held to a much higher standard, in part because of what happened in 2000, the Bushes' blood ties and Florida's considerable weight in the electoral college.

The elections supervisor said her county, Florida's largest in area and one of its most populous, had been using touch-screen technology for more than two years, including the November 2002 election for governor, and though there had been "human error," the machines have performed as advertised.

"What's unfortunate is these groups are predicting this doom and gloom, and it may and probably will discourage people from voting on election day," said LePore, who is on the November ballot for a third term, this time as an independent. "Every teeny-tiny thing that happens gets blown tremendously out of proportion."