Quest for paper vote trail heats up
State elections chief Glenda Hood vows ruling soon, while critics say she's stalling

By David Damron | Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted September 30, 2004

With the 2004 election barely a month away, Gov. Jeb Bush's election chief is seeking another round of opinions this week on how to recount votes cast on paperless electronic voting machines.

A spokeswoman said Secretary of State Glenda Hood could issue an emergency rule as early as next week after collecting ideas from local election supervisors, machine vendors and other interested parties.

Critics described Hood's action as an effort to keep Florida's election reforms out of court, and as a way to run out the clock before safeguards can be added to the touch-screen technology used in 15 counties where more than half the state's voters live.

They said Hood sought opinions several weeks ago on how to provide a paper record of electronic votes, only to reject them.

"They're delaying and politicizing the process," said Alma Gonzalez, a lawyer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. "There's already been too much politicization of this process by the administration of Jeb Bush, in an election in which his brother is running."

Hood spokeswoman Jenny Nash said the new round of responses was not meant to stall the process, since previous suggestions were inadequate. She also said the timing of challenges to the new technology smacked of politics, given that such complaints could have been more easily dealt with before or right after 2002 elections.

Touch-screen machines are one of several modern voting systems purchased by counties after Florida's disputed 2000 election. They record votes on computer chips, rather than on paper, so state laws ordering manual recounts in close races are difficult.

Hood issued an order earlier this year that exempted Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and other counties that use the machines from the recount law. But a judge overruled that decision.

Groups such as Common Cause Florida, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Florida Voters League have sought paper receipts for the machines, like those used on touch screens in Nevada's Sept. 7 elections. A federal appeals court Monday ordered a judge to hear a suit urging paper printouts for the Florida machines, similar to those produced by automated bank tellers.

Nash declined to outline what options Hood is considering to solve that legal issue, other than to rule out any type of paper receipt. For now, Nash said, Hood wants wide input on ways to allow for a recount.

Gonzalez and others say Hood sought that same advice weeks ago, only to discard it. Responding then, groups sent a letter on Sept. 10 to Hood suggesting ways the state could increase voter confidence in electronic machines and be more certain they accurately record votes.

Nash said the advice Hood received "really wasn't substantive."

Gov. Jeb Bush dismissed growing concerns about electronic voting Tuesday as "conspiracy theories." However, a number of researchers, vote watchdogs and lawmakers agree there are legitimate fears that electronic vote machines can malfunction or that hackers could affect results.

Former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and veteran international election monitor, has called Hood and other Florida election officials "highly partisan" and said "requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida."

One option Hood recently floated to the state's 67 election supervisors is to require touch-screen counties to print out what the state terms "ballot image files."

Critics say that term implies there are actual "images" that verify the action a voter made by pressing a screen.

In fact, both sides agree that reprinting "ballot image files" does not do that. Instead, such printouts merely replicate whatever record the voting machine reported in its first output of election results. It would simply repeat any errors.

But Pasco County Election Supervisor Kurt Browning, the leading advocate of touch screens among the counties using them, said the state has no option but to order a recount of just these "ballot image files."

Given the state's other options, Browning expects Hood will tell touch-screen counties to do this printout in her emergency rule soon.

Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho said he heard similar predictions voiced at a recent meeting of county election chiefs in Orlando. Sancho said he agreed this would do little to resolve the vote-verification concerns voiced by various litigants against the state.

A number of options were laid out to address concerns about security and malfunctions in the Sept. 10 letter sent to Hood by the lead lawyer for the groups pressing Florida on touch-screen issues.

One was to add printers to touch-screen machines, as Nevada did for its Sept. 7 election. That would allow a paper trail to be inspected in close races. Hood's office did not send a monitor to Nevada in August or September to see how those machines worked, and her office insists it is too late to add them in Florida.

A spokesman for Sequoia Voting System Inc., which sold machines and printers to Nevada, said Florida doesn't have time to add printers to its machines by Nov. 2. Six months or more would be needed to build and install them, a Sequoia official said.

Another option suggested by voting rights groups was to require touch-screen counties to run separate audits on each of three computer chips inside the machine to see if each chip produces the same results the machine reports in its final tally.

Another suggestion called for allowing those 15 counties to offer an optical-scan option to voters who requested a paper ballot at the polls. In these systems, the machine counts the votes, but the paper ballot also is kept.

A lead attorney for the ACLU said Hood's office appears to be delaying any action by seeking more input.

"For them to do be doing it again, it raises questions," said Jerry G. Traynham, of the firm Patterson & Traynham in Tallahassee. "I don't like to believe they are delaying, but they've already done this once."