Pending fiasco
Four years later, Florida's not ready

Volusia-Flagler News Journal  September 29, 2004

What can save the Florida election now?

It's a dispiriting question. The stage is set for disaster. Fifteen counties will be using a paperless, touch-screen voting system that has a deeply troubling record of inaccuracy, and state officials have managed to tangle up valid challenges long enough to make it unlikely a more reliable method can be found. (Volusia and Flagler counties use the more reliable optical-scan voting machines, which produce paper ballots.)

Meanwhile, state officials have said they won't count "provisional ballots" which are cast when a voter's status can't be determined at the polls unless they are cast in the voter's current precinct. That flies in the face of the Legislature's intentions to preserve votes whenever possible. Under this ruling, voters could be legally registered, but go to the wrong precinct (or even just the wrong table in a polling location that hosted two or more precincts) and be stripped of their right to vote. Even worse, they'd never know their votes weren't counted.

Former President Jimmy Carter, a global expert on electoral fairness, compares Florida's election process to that of other nations and finds that Florida doesn't measure up.

Most significantly, the state failed to enact statewide, uniform voting procedures that ensure all votes are cast and counted fairly. It also lacks a trusted, nonpartisan official or board that oversees elections statewide. Voters should make it clear that they expect both reforms to be a priority as soon as the Legislature comes back into session.

Instead, the partisanship has been almost sickening. Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood have paid lip service to reform while delaying, resisting, obfuscating and worse. The most flagrant example was the attempt to purge thousands of names from state voter rolls without notice or evidence a purge that demonstrably included hundreds of people who were eligible to vote. Hood and Bush were ultimately forced to abandon the flawed purge.

But on a grander scale, their delay tactics worked. For example, a lawsuit challenging the lack of recounts in counties that use touchscreen machines appeared to be a slam dunk under the 2000 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore. But state officials managed to wrap the issue up in red tape. A federal appellate court ruled Monday that the suit can proceed, but it's probably too late to put accountability measures or reforms in place for 2004.

Florida will have a hard time answering to the nation for this dereliction of duty.

There is one ray of hope, and that hope is vigilance. Carter says his center won't be monitoring the Florida elections, but other groups have said they will. Truthful, accurate information about the events taking place across Florida's 67 counties will be crucial in evaluating the impact of the state's refusal to safeguard the votes of its citizens.

It is a failure that should outrage every Floridian of voting age and galvanize them to demand action. The sanctity of the elections process is the cornerstone of democracy. Allowing it to erode further is unthinkable.