Lee voting machine tests run smoothly

By BETTY PARKER, bparker@news-press.com
 Published by news-press.com on August 13, 2004

In past years, no more than two or three people came for the pre-election tests of Lee County’s voting machines.

This year, more than a dozen — including top state election officials and observers — attended Thursday’s tests.

In past years, the process took about an hour.

This year, it took almost four hours, as observers questioned every step of the process.

It’s all remaining fallout from the debacle of 2000, which no one, regardless of party, wants to repeat.

“Everything went really, really well,” Lee Elections Supervisor Sharon Harrington said of the testing. “I hope we answered a lot of questions.”

The process was simple enough: the group — anyone could attend — cast ballots on about 20 of Lee County’s ES&S touch-screen machines at the elections center on Fowler Street.

Then they went to the main office downtown to watch as the machines spat out results, and make sure everything matched.

They did.

“I saw the process with these machines in Bonita’s 2002 election,” said Jack Tanner, a Libertarian there as a citizen observer.

“But I learned a lot with this demonstration. I was pretty impressed. I have a lot of confidence in this system.”

University of Central Florida President John Hitt was there because Secretary of State Glenda Hood asked him to observe Lee’s and several other counties’ process.

“It’s very reassuring to see how this works,” said Hitt, whose home county uses a different voting method. “It seems that there are adequate safeguards built in.”

Lee County’s Democratic state committeeman Bob Geltner came armed with a long list of questions, and went away with answers.

Whether the answers were to his liking was a different matter.

“The people at our elections office are always helpful and gracious about answering questions,” he said. “But I still want some kind of paper trail,” perhaps a card that shows voters how their votes registered.

County elections supervisors do not have the authority to use a system without state approval, and no system with a paper trail has been OK’d by the state.

“I guess I’m as satisfied as I can be under the circumstances,” Geltner said.

Every Florida county must test 2 percent of its voting machines, regardless of the system, before the election.

Not every county will have state observers, and tests in Southeast Florida, where many of 2000’s problems arose, have drawn the largest crowds.

Lee County regularly wins praise from state officials for the smoothness of its elections.