Federal trial on recounts with touch-screen machines in Florida

CATHERINE WILSON

Associated Press   18 October 2004

 

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Touch-screen voting machines are "inherently incapable" of manual recounts even though state law requires recounts in tight races, U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler testified Monday in his lawsuit seeking some kind of paper trail for more than half of Florida's voters.

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a new recount rule for 15 counties with touch-screen machines Friday to replace an old one struck down by a state judge in August. But Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, said: "She cannot do what the machines cannot do. The machines cannot conduct a manual recount."

But Stanford computer science professor David Dill offered an assortment of scenarios for touch-screen trouble from writing the software through the actual voting and tallying.

Touch-screen recount provisions amount to printing a duplicate copy of vote records from machines and counting them by hand, a process that should produce a different result only in case of "serious error or serious tampering," Dill testified on the first day of trial as a witness for Wexler.

If the Nov. 2 presidential election results are as tight as the 537-vote final margin in 2000, Wexler said, "I don't think this rule is going to satisfy either candidate."

Wexler wants U.S. District Judge James Cohn to quickly impose some short-term fixes for voting in two weeks and long-term remedies as well.

"We have a rule in effect that is specific to touch-screen equipment. That is all that is required," Assistant Attorney General George Waas told the judge. "This court is being asked to go where no court has gone before."

Ron Labasky, attorney for county election supervisors, insisted outside court that the rule meets the re-count requirement. He said skeptics will never be convinced, but, "You just have to trust the technology."

Florida threw out punch-card systems after its prolonged 2000 recount by magnifying glass became the butt of jokes. But touch-screen elections have produced undervotes, or votes that aren't counted, at five to six times the rate seen with optical scans, the only other voting system used in Florida.

Dill would prefer to see the touch-screen counties switch to optical scans because election officials have not certified any system for producing paper records to back up touch-screen votes. Touch-screen counties already use the fill-in-the-bubble ballots read by optical scanners for absentee voters.

"If there's a better solution that comes in five or ten years, we won't have run out of money," Dill said.

Touch-screen voting started Monday with early voting available at locations in all Florida counties. Problems cropped up quickly as a computer with a list of registered voters crashed in Orange County, and Broward County, the site of the trial, had some trouble linking laptops to elections headquarters.

Testimony was expected to stretch into Wednesday. The judge has given no indication when he might rule.