Voting systems poised to tally

Rachel Harris and Jim Reeder
Sunday, August 1, 2004

A month before the primary elections, Treasure Coast voters are suffering glancing blows from the preelection clashes to the south.

Scrutiny is particularly intense in Martin County, which uses the controversial touch-screen voting machines bought to solve the voter confidence problems from the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Even St. Lucie County, which uses optical scan machines, can't escape.

"We don't see anything that will make this election any different from 2000 or 2002," said St. Lucie County Elections Supervisor Gertrude Walker. "We know we're all under scrutiny."

Palm Beach County's elections supervisor, Theresa LePore, who became almost as well known as "Bush vs. Gore" in 2000 when the words "butterfly ballot" and "chad" entered the lexicon of U.S. political history, puts forth a calm demeanor.

"We've run more than 100 elections countywide with the new machines in the past two and half years and they've gone well," LePore said of her office's new touch-screen voting technology. "There are some elected officials out there preaching gloom and doom, and I'm hoping it doesn't turn people off and keep them from voting. That would be a shame."

As elections supervisors seek to assure voters here, politicians in Florida are pointing to potential problems, as did some at the Democratic national convention last week in Boston.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., called for an audit of the machines to make sure there are no problems that could throw a close election into chaos. U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler renewed his cry for a "paper trail" so there would be something to recount. Even the Florida Republican Party urged its members to use absentee ballots, to make sure their votes count.

At least in November, armies of lawyers for both parties will flock to the polls to observe the vote. Miami attorney Steve Zack, the Kerry campaign's general counsel in Florida, said he has recruited more than 100 attorneys to represent voters who encounter problems at the polls.

Armed with cellphones and Blackberry wireless devices, volunteer attorneys will staff every precinct with a history of high voter turnout and every elections office, Zack said. The team of lawyers includes former Attorney General Bob Butterworth, former U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey and Miami criminal defense lawyer Roy Black, he said. They will be watching and waiting for any mistakes.

Records of 2002 primary lost

Eleven Florida counties, including Martin County, use the iVotronic machines made by Election Systems & Software in Omaha, Neb. In Miami-Dade County, another Election Systems & Software user, officials said Tuesday that a computer crash had erased detailed records from the 2002 primary elections.

By Friday, Miami-Dade County officials said they had located another copy of the records, but many still wonder whether records couldn't be purged from Martin County, making a recount this year impossible.

"That's definitely a concern that's been raised a lot within the party," said Terrence Nolan, chairman of the Martin County Democratic Executive Committee. "We're encouraging people to vote absentee, so, that way, they know there's a paper trail."

Martin County Deputy Elections Supervisor Emma Smith said her office has sent out about 5,500 absentee ballots for the primary election and expects to send out about 12,000 for the November general election.

In the 2000 general election, 9,773 absentee ballots were cast in Martin County.

But Smith said voters who turn out at the polls have no reason to think their votes won't be counted and recorded.

"If information in Miami-Dade was d, that didn't happen at the polls," she said. "That happened in the elections office, when someone hit '' instead of 'enter.' "

That sort of mistake would never happen in Martin County, where records are stored in more than one place, said Elections Supervisor Peggy Robbins. Aside from being saved on a computer hard drive, election results are kept in paper files and on a disk for 22 months.

But the touch-screen machines have raised other concerns. In June, state officials said Election Systems & Software had a bug that skewed paper printouts of the votes, making a manual recount impossible. The State Division of Elections and company officials said they could correct the problem by linking the machines with laptop computers to extract the information.

But Martin County wouldn't have been affected by the glitch anyway, said Becky Vollmer, a spokeswoman for Election Systems & Software. The error affected only counties that retrieve voting records from the flashcard, which is just one of many sites in the machine that record voting information.

Counties, including Martin, that retrieve voter information from three memory chips separate from the flashcard would not have experienced the glitch, Vollmer said.

Martin County officials say they don't expect any other problems with the machines. Since 2001, when the county first got the iVotronic machines, elections officials have been meeting every two months with Election Systems & Software representatives, Smith said.

"When they made the machines, they weren't perfect," she said. "They're still not perfect, but any little problems we've encountered have been fixed."

Such as the button voters press to cast their ballot. Initially, the red button stayed lighted the whole time the voter perused the ballot. Martin County officials asked that it flash when a person has voted for each race and make a loud noise when the ballot is finally cast.

The company complied, and now its touch-screen machines in all counties have vote buttons that flash and make noise, Smith said.

St. Lucie County won't have to worry about such issues because it uses optical scanners that count the ballots after voters mark ovals beside their candidate's name.

Walker opted for the optical scanners in 1996, after two close races in 1990 showed the problem with the punch-card ballots: With each tally in the recounts of county commission and school board races, more chads flew out of the machines, increasing the leaders' margins.

"You could recount and get different totals," Walker said. "After that, I didn't want to hear the word chad again."

Memory cards problematic

A check of correspondence at the St. Lucie County elections office showed only routine mechanical problems with the optical scanners.

Some card reader rollers, which move the ballot into the secrecy bin, have been replaced. Memory cards, where ballot counts are stored on each machine, also have proved problematic.

Donna Daloisio, systems administrator for the St. Lucie County elections office, said she has 50 bad memory cards that are unstable.

"It's obvious that we cannot take the risk of using them in an election," she wrote in a March 2004 e-mail to the scanners' manufacturer.

But Walker said they keep plenty of spare memory cards in case one fails on election day despite preelection testing of the machines.