Hood given no choice on state election recount

By Palm Beach Post Editorial

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood got a legal rebuke Friday in her effort to single-handedly eliminate manual recounts in counties that may account for more than half of the state's votes for president in November. So now the Division of Elections is soliciting ideas from the public. What took her so long?

For more than a year, the Division of Elections — which reports to Ms. Hood, who reports to Gov. Bush — has been ignoring calls from Democrats for a verifiable paper trail. While the Democrats' option would raise issues of its own, Ms. Hood has done nothing to ensure that the equipment the division certifies provides a manageable way to meet a state law that calls for hand recounts of undervotes and overvotes in races decided by less than one-quarter of 1 percent. "A manual recount is unnecessary and logistically impossible," said Gov. Bush's spokeswoman Alia Faraj, on loan to Ms. Hood for damage control, "because supervisors would have to print out a supermarket-like receipt that could stretch from Miami to the Panhandle."

But whose fault is that? The secretary of state's office, under Katherine Harris and Ms. Hood, has had since 2001 to make the machines compatible with state law. Instead, Ms. Hood decided to flout the law, establishing a rule in February that removed the requirement for manual recounts on electronic machines, which will be used in 15 counties, including Palm Beach and Martin. The other 52 counties use optical scanners, on which manual recounts are possible.
 

This spring, however, the Legislature refused to ban manual recounts for touch-screen machines only. Administrative Law Judge Susan Kirkland, responding to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, pointed out the obvious last week when she ruled that Ms. Hood's rule-making didn't follow the law.

Newspapers have warned about the problem for months, but only after a judge gave her no choice is Ms. Hood asking "interested parties" — advocacy groups, manufacturers of voting equipment, concerned citizens — for ideas. "Interested parties" better hurry. Nine weeks before Florida voters cast presidential ballots for the first time since the fiasco of November 2000, Florida has no legal plan for recounting votes in a tight race.

Ms. Hood has disdained the option demanded by Democrats — printers at every touch-screen machine to create a paper trail for recounts verified by voters before they leave the voting booth. Nor has she shown interest in touch-screen features that encode ballots on paper during elections or allow the printing of ballot images after elections. She has criticized the Democrats' idea without trying to find a reasonable alternative.

Banning manual recounts creates two separate, unequal systems for counting votes in Florida. Encouraging such a solution, which the Supreme Court cited in ruling for George W. Bush in 2000, is as irresponsible as waiting until nine weeks before the presidential election to engage the public.