LePore: We'll be ready for elections

John Lantigua
Sunday, August 1, 2004

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore sits in her "war room" about 30 days before the ballot battles of 2004 begin. She is finalizing preparations for the Aug. 31 primaries and bolstering her troops for The Big One: the Nov. 2 general election that will pick the next president.

"We'll be ready," she declares.

If she is haunted by the harrowing events of 2000, when her name became almost as well known as "Bush vs. Gore," and the words "butterfly ballot" and "chad" entered the lexicon of U.S. political history, she isn't letting it show.

"We've run more than 100 elections countywide with the new machines in the past two and half years, and they've gone well," she says 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."

But even as LePore sought to assure voters here, politicians in Florida and at the Democratic Party's national convention in Boston were pointing to potential problems. There were calls for the U.S. Justice Department to investigate those very touch-screen machines.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., called for an audit of the machines to make sure there are no outstanding 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.

Meanwhile, in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, problems continued to create doubt in the electoral process. Just last week, Miami-Dade elections officials announced that all electronic records of the 2002 elections had been lost due to a computer glitch, prompting a new round of calls for a paper trail on touch-screen voting machines.

At week's end, befuddled Miami-Dade officials were stunned to discover they still had a record of the 2002 election after all, on a compact disc sitting in a file gathering dust. It had simply been "misplaced."

In Broward, suspended Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant, often blamed for botching the count in 2002, was fighting to get her job back.

After all that, who could blame voters for having doubts about Florida's ability to pull off a smooth election?

In November, armies of lawyers from both parties will flock to the polls to scrutinize the vote. Miami attorney Steve Zack, the Kerry campaign's general counsel in Florida, said he has already 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 Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, former U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey and Miami criminal defense attorney Roy Black, he said. They will be watching and waiting for any mistakes.

But that wasn't fazing LePore. In an interview, she enumerated all the facets of the polling process, her state of readiness, possible problems, and many ways the system has changed, hopefully for the better, since 2000.

Of course, running the elections won't be easy.

This time around, there are thousands more voters. Voter registration for the primary ends Monday, and Oct. 4 for the general election.

LePore expects about 700,000 to be eligible to vote in the primary and 725,000 before Nov. 2, compared with 656,694 who were registered in 2000. They will cast ballots at about 695 precincts, compared with 637 four years ago.

LePore expects a 30-to-35-percent turnout for the primary, soaring to 70 percent to 75 percent in November, when the presidency is at stake and once more the eyes of the world are on Florida, the critical battleground where the election melted down just four years ago.