Voting rights groups urge Florida to prepare for presidential recount

By Mark Hollis   South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted October 13 2004

TALLAHASSEE · Voting rights groups, acknowledging that it's too late to attach expensive paper ballot printers to touch-screen voting machines, said the state should consider other last-ditch alternatives to make sure possible recounts like that in Florida's historic 2000 presidential election will be verifiable.

A coalition of more than a half dozen voting-reform groups and a representative of South Florida U.S. Rep Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, are demanding that the 15 counties using touch-screen machines, including Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, give voters a paper-ballot option.

 The groups also say that an election recount should be put under a federal court's supervision and that poll workers should be prepared for several new tasks, including making sure that every vote counted matches the number of people who vote.

The proposals touted as a way to end lawsuits dealing with election recounts surfaced during an unusual and highly tense meeting Tuesday between aides to Secretary of State Glenda Hood and representatives from several voter-reform groups involved with a flurry of election-related lawsuits around Florida.

"We can't fix it completely for 2004, there's no doubt about that, but we certainly can set up a system that helps us get farther than they are right now," said Alma Gonzalez, a lawyer representing the groups. "We can't keep having déjà vu. We have to stop."

The groups demanding the action included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, People for the American Way and several labor unions.

Immediate reaction to their demands from Hood's general counsel, Richard Perez, was cordial but tepid. Supervisors of elections in South Florida balked at several of the proposals, saying the civil rights groups are asking for too much retooling too close to the election.

"It's a recipe for disaster," said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, dismissing the group's demands as unwieldy and expensive. "It would be impossible for us to do anything at this late date."

LePore and other elections officials questioned how the state would go about tabulating paper ballots, which would require optical scanning devices, possibly in each precinct.

For Broward County, the proposal would mean requiring at least one additional poll workers at each of the 777 precincts, driving up costs and creating new logistical nightmares, warned Gisela Salas, Broward's deputy supervisor of elections. Salas called it a "tremendous undertaking" and "an extreme logistic project."

The ideas weren't received any more favorably in Miami-Dade County, where Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the county elections department, said the changes would require retraining more than 7,000 poll workers in the country in less than three weeks.

"You just want to be careful that the cure isn't worse than the disease," Kaplan said.

Despite the criticism, the groups said they're offering ideas that, if adopted, will allow them to their lawsuits dealing with election recounts.

Wexler, for instance, is suing Hood in federal court over the electronic voting machines. That case will be heard next week. He and the voter reform groups have insisted that a paper trail is needed to ensure that votes are accurately counted in the counties that now use the ATM-like touch-screen machines.

"We're all boxed in with lousy choices," Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said Tuesday. "We ought not be in this situation three weeks before the election ... We're looking at a range of lousy solutions."

Nearly half the state's voters are expected to use the machines when they go to the polls Nov. 2.

The machines can print a paper audit, but the audit doesn't provide enough information to determine voter intent in the case of a recount.

Hood's office had earlier invited Wexler and others to help draft an emergency recount rule. State elections officials are now set to adopt a new state rule outlining what would be done if there is a need for a manual recount.

Perez, Hood's general counsel, is writing the rule after a judge, in August, tossed out a prior rule that exempted the electronic machines from any recount requirement.

Under Perez' draft proposal, the state suggests that election workers scan through ballot images to count the number of ballots in which no candidate was chosen, known as "under votes." But the state plan doesn't suggest what to do if election workers and the touch-screen machines come up with a different number of under votes.

The state's proposal also doesn't include allowing voters to choose between voting on a computer or paper, which the civil rights groups say is necessary.

In cases of close elections, state law requires a manual recount of "over votes" and "under votes" when an election margin is less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the votes cast. But how the state should go about recounting votes on electronic machines remains unresolved for this election.

Reaction from South Florida was provided for this report by Sun-Sentinel Staff Writers Naoki Schwartz, Buddy Nevins and Anthony Man.