Ruckus smacks voters' trust down for count

By Frank Cerabino

Sunday, August 08, 2004

I think there ought to be a new word to describe what's happening to voting in Florida.

Publixification. That would be my word for it.

It's the best way to describe the "Paper or plastic?" paranoia that is spreading way beyond the borders of what might be normally assumed to be the lunatic fringe.
 

We've spent millions of dollars to create a technology in the hopes of eliminating voter error, only to realize that in the process, it may just be enabling a systemic, untraceable fraud.

But a fraud of that magnitude? That would take evildoers.

You'd have to really have a deep distrust of the government, and its willingness to deceive, to believe that this sort of fraud is possible.

Unfortunately, that distrust is ripening. And not only for those chronic 5-percenters but also for a segment of the population with otherwise less developed imaginations.

This is what happens when a government has shown time and time again that it can't be trusted.

2004 has too many 'maybes'

Maybe if the bold arrogance of another suspiciously sloppy felon purge hadn't been duplicated this year in Florida, things might have been different. And maybe if the state government didn't fight so hard to keep its flawed purge of voters from coming to public light, things might have been different.

And maybe if the governor of Florida wasn't the president's brother, and maybe if that president wasn't counting on Florida to win — again.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. The maybes start stacking up, and they're juxtaposed to an ends-justifies-the-means way of doing business, as evidenced by the bait-and-switch rationale for war in Iraq.

It's enough to make reasonable people fear the worst.

When a Florida Republican Party mailing went out recently urging party members to vote absentee as a way to avoid the leave-no-record-behind electronic voting machines, it was the last straw.

More and more Democrats are wondering whether the bitter November 2000 election may just have been a warm-up for what's to come.

Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach, has urged Gov. Jeb Bush to provide paper ballots alongside the touch-screen machines in the polling places at the 15 counties using the new high-tech equipment.

Voting recounts no longer needed?

Ralph Neas, president of the nonpartisan People for the American Way Foundation, made a similar request to the governor last week.

Neas wrote the governor about "a rising tide of mistrust" in electronic voting in Florida and argued that there needed to be a way to verify vote totals.

"Given the history of the 2000 recount in Florida, and the controversy that has swirled around the flawed 'potential felon' purge list, the perception of electoral chaos is beginning to take root," Neas wrote.

"Nothing is more important to the conduct of a fair election in Florida than the ability to count, and if necessary, to recount each and every vote cast," Neas wrote.

But even with a Publixification of the polling places, that won't be likely.

The reality is that the plastic touch-screen solution to the paper chads has eliminated recounts and replaced them with trust in what is essentially black-box technology.

So what will it be for you? Paper or plastic?

The question itself answers another one.

We're starting to drown in that rising tide of mistrust.