Florida still lacks uniform voting standard

OUR OPINION: LAWSUITS MAY BE ONLY WAY TO REBUILD VOTERS' CONFIDENCE

Miami Herald  30 September 2004

Florida Congressman Robert Wexler's seemingly moribund quest for a statewide paper trail of votes cast on electronic voting machines got a reprieve this week from the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and that's good news for Florida's voters.

The appellate court reversed a lower court's rejection of Mr. Wexler's lawsuit, which would require the state to provide paper receipts for touch-screen machines and a paper trail for a manual recount. Now federal Judge James Cohn must consider the lawsuit's merits.

A single standard

There is merit in this case because Mr. Wexler seeks nothing less than to establish a single, uniform standard for all Florida voters when it comes to having their votes counted, especially if a recount is necessary.

The U.S. Supreme Court cited the state's lack of such a standard in its 2000 ruling that suspended the state's recount of presidential ballots and declared President Bush the winner. But after reforms enacted by the Legislature, including switching to electronic voting systems, the state still lacks a uniform standard. That's because most counties now use optical scanners that read voters' choices on printed ballots while 15 counties, including Broward and Miami-Dade, use touch-screen machines that tally votes electronically without a paper trail. Those 15 counties account for 50 percent of Florida's population.

Last month, in a case similar to Mr. Wexler's, a state court threw out Secretary of State Glenda Hood's administrative ruling, issued last winter, that the counties with touch-screen machines cannot do manual recounts in close elections. Ms. Hood's faulty reasoning was that touch screens don't allow overvotes votes cast for more than one candidate in a race, a major problem in 2000 so manual recounts aren't necessary. Thus, the counties' only option would be to recount votes electronically meaningless since the machines would simply produce the same results. State law plainly requires manual recounts in close races, which is why the judge ruled against Ms. Hood.

Too late for November

Ms. Hood has since ordered work on a new rule by the Nov. 2 elections that would explain how touch-screen machines' votes can be recounted manually. Would that she had issued this ruling in the first place. For there is no chance that the machines can be adapted with printers to produce a paper trail by November. The state must certify the printers before using them in order to validate the vote and no certification has been done.

If Judge Cohn were to rule in favor of a paper trail, it could put added pressure on the state to establish a single uniform standard of tallying votes in a recount. But such a ruling still wouldn't leave time to make the needed improvements to guarantee voters in 15 counties that their vote will be counted and recounted, if necessary accurately. Unless, of course, voters resort to absentee ballots.