Minor problems, nothing major as voters hit polls

RACHEL LA CORTE

Associated Press 31 August 2004

MIAMI - Florida election officials said Tuesday's primary went off with only minor glitches, but some critics said that doesn't mean the Election Day disasters of 2000 and 2002 won't be repeated in November.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood said that when the last polls closed at 8 p.m. EDT, her office had no reports of major problems, even from election chiefs in populous Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties and areas hit by Hurricane Charley.

"All in all, things went very smoothly," said Hood, who traveled the state Tuesday to visit precincts and even served as a poll worker in Orange County. "Voters should feel very confident."

Hood had said most of the problems she had heard about were people who weren't sure where their precincts were and had to be redirected. One precinct in Broward County opened a few minutes late because the poll person forgot to get the key from the pastor of the church, she said.

Despite reports from some voter watch groups, Hood said she received no reports of problems with the ATM-style touchscreen voting machines that are used in 15 counties, which critics argue are vulnerable to tampering and glitches.

One precinct in Polk County briefly lost power, but voting was not disrupted because the machine were on battery backup, she said.

Attorney Cindy Cohn, working with the Election Protection coalition, said that while there were no "catastrophic" problems, the coalition received reports of machines not booting up or freezing up on voters, and that in Broward County, there were reports of machines not bringing up a Democratic ballot. Broward Elections officials said they had no report of problems.

"There's nothing about today that alleviates the concern we've been raising all along," said Cohn, who's legal director of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. "These machines haven't been independently tested, they don't have an audit trail ... this idea that we have to cross our fingers and hope everything went OK is no way to run an election."

In Volusia County, there were problems in five precincts with the scanners that read the paper ballots, but they were fixed within half an hour, said Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe.

Lowe said voting was not halted, but while the scanners were being fixed, the votes went into a "secure emergency bin" and would be scanned at the end of the day.

Many election rights groups placed poll monitors and on-call attorneys at scattered precincts to take statements from people who did have problems, like 33-year-old Miami resident Blas Lopez.

Lopez's issue wasn't the machine, it was the fact that a poll worker gave him a nonpartisan ballot even though he's a registered Democrat. He didn't realize the mistake until after he cast his vote, and wasn't allowed to correct it.

"I feel cheated," said Lopez, who intended to vote for Betty Castor in the Democratic Senate primary. "No matter how sophisticated the system is it's only as strong as the poll workers."

The touchscreen machines are the state's solution to the much-maligned and no-longer-used punchcard ballots.

Those ballots, which introduced the nation to the terms hanging and dimpled chads, were responsible for delaying the outcome of the 2000 race between George Bush and Al Gore for more than a month. Other Florida counties use optical scanner machines, where voters use pencils to mark ballots that are then counted by computers.

Critics say the touchscreen machines threaten the integrity of elections because they don't produce a paper record that can verify votes if there are problems.

Two years ago, it took Florida a week to determine that Tampa attorney Bill McBride narrowly defeated former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in the Democratic primary, in large part because of problems Miami-Dade and Broward counties had opening and closing polls and tallying votes.

In the Broward County community of Pembroke Pines, Yvonne Galore liked her touchscreen experience "because the paper was confusing, honestly," she said. "This introduces more color and clarity."

But Evelyn Stauber from nearby Delray Beach was less satisfied: "I'd like a paper chain. How do I know that it's being received the way I voted. And if there is a challenge, how do I contest it?"

Last week, an administrative law judge ruled that a state rule barring the 15 Florida counties that use touchscreens from doing manual recounts is at odds with state law, which requires hand recounts in certain close elections. The rule will remain in place for now because of an automatic 30-day stay allowing Hood time to decide whether to appeal the judge's ruling.

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