Let every vote count
Hood should stop the fight against verification

Volusia-Flagler Co. News-Independent 31 August 2004

Florida officials have had three years, eight months, two weeks and five days since the U.S. Supreme Court smacked the state for unfair, untrustworthy elections practices in the 2000 electoral primary.

But Florida still hovers on the brink of disaster. Voters in 15 counties that use controversial touch-screen technology will go to the polls today with little reassurance that their votes will be counted. Instead of working to provide that comfort, the state has been wasting time and resources fighting over the issue in court.

Friday, the state got what could be its last warning of the trouble yet to come. An administrative law judge ripped the state Division of Elections for ignoring state law by saying that touch-screen results are not subject to manual recounts. The impact of the decision is not yet clear. Some say it rules out touch-screen voting altogether. Others contend that the state will be forced to buy printers for the touch-screen machines a process that will probably take longer than the two months left before the Nov. 2 election. Others say the ruling will only require a pro-forma re-evaluation of the data stored in the machine, a "recount" in name only.

It's also hard to say what measures the state could take in the two months left. Some advocates are pushing for the state to lease or re-distribute the more reliable optical-scan vote-counting machines (such as the ones used in Volusia and Flagler counties) for the November elections. Others are pushing for alternative measures, such as paper ballots at all polling places for voters who don't trust the touch-screen systems. A third course would be to adopt a parallel, "real-time" auditing system to electronically monitor the performance of touch-screen machines during an actual election. Finally, there's still the remote possibility that the state could implement a printer system that would provide a voter-verified paper trail that could later be rechecked against the machine totals.

None of these solutions is perfect, and each represents its own logistical nightmare. The only thing that's certain and relentless is the ticking of the clock.

State officials could ignore all the options, and proceed instead to court, tying the issue up in legal battles until it's absolutely too late to do anything. That course must certainly seem tempting today to Secretary of State Glenda Hood. But it would be a wrong decision.

Florida's voters need their Secretary of State to stop fighting them, and start looking for ways to address the very real and valid fear that history is about to repeat itself.