Do more to abate valid election concerns

OUR OPINION: CORRECTIVE ACTIONS BY LOCAL OFFICIALS SHOULD HELP

Miami Herald   09 August 2004

It's too bad that Miami-Dade County Manager George Burgess had to cut short his vacation to return to County Hall last week to respond to growing mistrust in the accuracy and fairness of the fall elections. But it is heartening that Mr. Burgess shows a strong sense of responsibility for the election process. Even better was his announcement that the county's Office of Inspector General and Office of Audit and Management will devote their considerable abilities to ensuring that all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted during the weeks leading up to the Aug. 31 and Nov. 2 elections.

Luck is not enough

It's better to have overseers and election workers tripping over one another to tend to every detail than to have any more unwarranted mistakes such as a failure to safeguard voting data, which appeared to be the case in Miami-Dade for the close 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary. It looked as though computer crashes had destroyed the data, which simply shouldn't happen with today's sophisticated software. Luckily and apparently that's all it was, luck back-up records of the primary information were found.

Miami-Dade Commission Chair Barbara Carey-Shuler correctly shook up county officials with her call last week for immediate measures to restore confidence in the voting process to prevent Miami-Dade from once again being a national ''laughingstock'' as the county and the entire state, in fact, were dubbed for messing up the 2000 election.

Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood should deliver an equally strong call to action to restore trust in Florida's elections. Their oft-repeated mantra that the concerns are being generated by political ''trouble makers'' rings hollow. Concerns about the reliability of touch-screen and, to a lesser extent, optical-scanning machines have come from all quarters. Last month the Republican Party of Florida sent a mailing to GOP-registered voters in parts of Miami-Dade advising them ''to make sure'' that their votes are counted by using absentee ballots, not the touch-screen machines.

Do independent audit

State GOP officials backtracked and apologized once this became news, but that doesn't negate their concerns about the reliability of the electronic-voting machines used in 15 counties. They have no paper record of votes cast. It may be too late to retrofit them with printers in time for the upcoming elections to provide a backup for recounts. Yet it's not too late for Ms. Hood at the least to order an independent audit of these machines, as voting-rights advocates have called on her to do.