In Florida, the same old people problems

BY REBECCA WAKEFIELD
Rebecca Wakefield is a staff writer for Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper

Newsday   October 10, 2004

Miami-Dade County is home to roughly 2.5 million people, about half of whom were not born in the United States. There are about a million registered voters here, all hopped up on café Cubano and political intrigue. Elections for us are a heady, nonsensical mix of passions - as much about the old homeland as neighborhood potholes.

We are a community of divisions, Balkanized by differences in language, national origin, skin color, economic opportunity and unhealed wounds. The politics of all this can get ridiculous. Conspiracy theories abound. We do not trust each other. And never more so than now.

After the debacle of the 2000 elections, in Miami and other areas of the state, rage boiled out of black neighborhoods that saw the return of Dixie in their perceived disenfranchisement. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that more than half the votes rejected by election supervisors had been cast by blacks in communities with faulty polling machines and poor voter education. Even the more apathetic masses around the state felt the prick of anger at becoming a national punch line forever linked with "hanging chads."

Politicians blamed it all on antiquated voting methods and passed laws requiring counties to buy the magic beans that would fix it all: electronic voting machines that would flawlessly and unambiguously record every vote. A handful of companies sold counties expensive voting systems, but election officials then felt obliged by fear or ignorance to turn over their bureaucratic souls to the machines. Miami-Dade spent about $24 million for the equipment, and then many millions more getting it to work properly - without having adequately prepared the gummy-fingered electorate or poll workers who must use it.

The first large-scale test of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade was the not surprisingly messed-up 2002 gubernatorial primary, in which Janet Reno narrowly lost to a lawyer from Tampa. Polls opened late, voting machines malfunctioned, hundreds of voters were turned away from the polls and more than 1,500 votes disappeared. To be fair to the widget-makers, a good percentage of the problems were what you'd call human error, caused by poor training and unfamiliarity with the new machines.

This time around, it's not so much the machines that skeptics worry about. It's the people - those running local elections and those making the laws that rule the process. Election workers have a little more training, but state officials have endlessly proven they care less about accurate elections than they do about smooth ones. Smooth, as in trouble-free, no questions asked.

To wit, earlier this year, the legislature removed a requirement that absentee ballots be signed by a witness, ostensibly to prevent ballots from being thrown out on a technicality. But the real effect will be to streamline the whole business of voter fraud. People here remember that in 1997 it was irregularities with witness signatures in the Miami mayor's race that led to an investigation that overturned the election when it was discovered that nonresidents and even dead people had voted absentee. That kind of fraud now will be harder to detect.

Yet, even as Gov. Jeb Bush denounced as partisan the concerns of voting rights groups like the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition regarding the reliability of the machines and election procedures, the plausible deniability wing of the state Republican Party (among other groups, including some Democratic ones) was sending mailers encouraging people with machine phobia to vote absentee.

This spring, state elections officials attempted to get a law passed banning manual recounts on touch-screen voting machines, which bolstered suspicions about the machines' reliability. When that failed, thanks to the vigilance of activists, Secretary of State Glenda Hood sneakily issued a state rule to the same effect, arguing that the machines don't need a paper trail. A judge threw out the rule in August, but Hood could still issue an emergency rule.

Then there is the state's purge list of ex-felons who can't vote in Florida, which Hood was forced to abandon after it was revealed by the media that the list included far too many blacks, while vastly undercounting the numbers of Hispanic ex-felons.That Florida law enforcement officers may have intentionally tried to intimidate elderly black voters by showing up unannounced at their homes in Orlando during a probe of voting fraud last spring is adding to the level of paranoia and mistrust that surrounds voting in Florida.

 

It doesn't boost confidence to know that most of the reforms in place to ensure that Leno and Letterman have nothing further to say about how we conduct elections have been forced on the elections officials by relentless activists and media scrutiny. The two major political parties have each focused far more on the old tropes of politicking than on the nitty-gritty of ensuring accurate elections. The Republican strategy is, oddly, to advocate blind trust in government, while the Democrats try to leverage the legitimate fears of voters into increased turnout of the base, or at least the groundwork for a lawsuit if they lose.

The usual political jockeying aside, much of the fate of Florida's electoral votes actually perches on the narrow shoulders of paper shufflers and technicians in the 67 county elections departments around the state.

These poor saps aren't, by and large, trying to steal any election, but they do make mistakes - accidentally unplugging vital computers, misplacing critical files or stamping the wrong date on an application. It should be the desire of the political parties and state officials to demand the highest level of confidence in our elections, but they don't.

It's a lot easier to holler and pontificate if the system doesn't work for you than it is to ensure that the system works for all - even the people you oppose.