E-Vote Recount Rule in Dispute 

By Jacob Ogles WiredNews Aug. 31, 2004 PT

Florida officials will not require any recounts of votes cast on touch-screen voting machines during Tuesday's state primary, despite a ruling by an administrative judge that counties using electronic voting are not exempt from laws requiring the re-tabulation of votes in close elections.

The judge, Susan Kirkland, issued a ruling Friday in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. In it, she points out that the Florida legislature decided earlier this year not to amend state law to bar recounts of electronic votes. 
 
State officials have not decided if they will appeal the ruling, but they will not change their rules for the primary. The situation should be cleared up before the November presidential election.

"The whole reason that touch-screen machines were put into place and that some of the counties chose to use them was to avoid the problems they encountered in 2000," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State. "This is a step backward to that time."

President Bush won the state's electoral votes by just 537 votes after 36 days of recount and contest.

Florida law requires a manual recount of the votes in any election in which the winner's margin of victory is a quarter of a percent or less of the total vote. But Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued an administrative rule earlier this year that officials in 15 counties using touch-screen ballots would not need to recount those votes because the results would be no different.

Kirkland's order throws out that rule.

"If the legislature had intended that no manual recounts be done in counties using voting systems which did not use paper ballots, it could easily have done so; it did not," Kirkland wrote in her final order.

State officials have 30 days from Friday to appeal the ruling.

Voting advocacy groups lauded the ruling. ACLU attorney Jerry Traynham said the ruling "now frees county supervisors in those counties using touch-screen voting systems to make arrangements for a manual recount."

People for the American Way President Ralph Neas asked state officials to embrace the decision, and to "go on to require voter-verifiable paper trails in time for the November elections."

Eleven counties in Florida use iVotronic machines from Nebraska-based Election Systems and Software. An audit trail from those ballots can be conducted by downloading ballot images to a laptop computer and printing them. Four counties in Florida use Sequoia Edge touch-screen machines, which print out a paper tabulation of votes automatically, but which can also be connected to a printer and have images of each vote generated.

But state officials said this would not produce differing results from the original tabulation. The machines cannot accept overvotes, and undervotes would register as if no vote was cast at all.

Elections officials throughout the state expressed frustration that the ruling was issued so close to the statewide primary. And the issue may become more contentious after the election. In the statewide Republican Party primary, former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez are in a statistical dead heat. A St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald poll released Sunday showed the top contenders within 2 percent of one another.

The polling data may foreshadow the sort of election for which Florida has become famous. In 2002, Tampa attorney Bill McBride won the Democratic nomination for governor by 4,794 votes over former Attorney General Janet Reno, who refused to concede for several days partly because of reported input errors with e-voting in south Florida counties.

But if the results do become contentious, many elections officials expect the State Department to back off its no-recount stance.

"Right now we're operating without a rule," said Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson, "but we don't need one unless there is a recount needed. At that point, I think the Division of Elections will meet in an emergency situation and develop a rule."