Potential troubles make repeat of 2000 electiondebacle a possibility

By Linda Kleindienst
and Jeremy Milarsky  South Florida Sun Sentinel Posted October 27 2004

Four years after the most controversial presidential election in modern U.S. history when Florida kept the nation waiting 36 days to find out George W. Bush was elected by 537 votes many of the problems that plagued the state are still around.

Florida has no uniform voting system, despite the unanimous recommendation of a bipartisan state task force that the state convert to one voting method.

There is no centralized voter database to discourage fraud. More than half the state's voters will cast ballots on machines that have no paper trail.

In the wake of the 2000 fiasco, the governor appointed a task force of 10 Democrats, 10 Republicans and one independent to find ways to avoid an embarrassing repeat.

A key recommendation was to remove politics from the elections system.

But most of the state's 67 independent supervisors of elections are still elected partisans who retain the constitutional right to decide who can vote in their counties and what votes are counted. Florida's chief elections officer, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a former Orlando mayor and longtime Bush family political ally once considered as a running mate for the governor, is a Jeb Bush appointee.

Like four years ago, when he became a lightning rod for criticism by Democrats who accused him of helping George W. Bush win the presidency, Jeb Bush this year again is chairman of his brother's Florida campaign.

And like four years ago, the secretary of state has made controversial decisions from a refusal to back the call for paper ballot receipts on touch-screen voting machines to unveiling a controversial felon voter list to rules on how voter applications should be completed that have enraged Democrats and their political allies.

Can Florida get it right this time?

Former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat whose Atlanta-based Carter Center has monitored 50 elections around the world, wrote Sept. 27 in a Washington Post column that "some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing" in Florida.

Particularly critical of the "strong political biases" of state leaders and elections officials and the lack of a paper trail for the state's touch-screen voting machines, Carter wrote, "The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely."

Nonsense, responded Republican Gov. Bush, the president's younger brother. The election, he vowed, will be a fair one.

"I think there's an effort under way to set up a post-election strategy [for lawsuits] and I think it does harm to people's confidence," Bush said. "When you have 6 or 7 million people voting, it's never going to be perfect. And the way you gin this up, you create an expectation of perfection."

Mark Pritchett, of the Collins Center for Public Policy at Florida State University, researched and wrote the 2001 governor's task force report that contained 35 unanimous recommendations to fix the state's election system.

"I think we're better off in a lot of respects," he said in comparing the elections. "The report has withstood the test of time so far. Everyone was focused on chads ... and we did get rid of them. That's the good news."

During its 2001 session, Florida's Republican-dominated Legislature adopted the nation's most wide-ranging election reforms, which included only about one-third of the task force's recommendations.

On the plus side, poll worker training has improved, the state has put more money into voter education, there is no discretion left at the county level on when to recount or certify the election and a voter standing in line before a precinct's scheduled closing time has a guaranteed right to cast a ballot.

The state has also worked harder to help restore civil and voting rights to eligible felons, and the requirement for a uniform state ballot will eliminate the potential for a recurrence of the infamous "butterfly ballot" that confused voters in Palm Beach County in 2000.

The state instituted early voting and allowed for provisional ballots to be cast by voters if their name is not on a precinct's voter roll.

"Clearly, there is a strategy among Democrats to discredit everything in Florida about our election system. Our election laws are miles ahead of where they were," said Jim Smith, a former state attorney general and secretary of state who was co-chairman of the election task force. "Certainly there can be glitches, but I don't think we'll have anything of the magnitude of 2000."

But while the state has standardized recount rules, more than half of Florida's 10.3 million registered voters who live in just 15 counties will cast ballots on electronic ATM-like machines that do not provide a paper receipt, leaving no clear record of their intent for recount purposes. The decision to buy those machines without printers was made by the counties.

Florida's constitution was purposefully structured so that the 67 counties would have autonomy, said Robert Jarvis, a constitutional law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie. He thinks the U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the 2000 election established the need for uniformity in the way Florida officials interpret and enforce election laws.

"What's fair to say is, prior to 2000, we had always had a decentralized way of running elections," he said. "But we really didn't reform our laws after Bush vs. Gore and we're, in a way, back where we were in 2000.

"The potential is ... certainly, you could have, once again, the Supreme Court saying Florida did the vote wrong."

While the state's election task force left the door open for future technology, it strongly recommended that Florida's counties switch from punch-card ballots to an optical scan system using a paper ballot. Fifty-two counties use that system. It is the only one in the state that provides a paper receipt which elections officials can use to determine voter intent. Touch screens are used in 15 counties, including Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade.

There is also no uniform method for counties to deal with voter registration. Individual supervisors can determine whether an application meets legal requirements, which includes checking off citizenship boxes, and each county decides how to purge from its voting list felons whose civil rights have not been restored by the governor and Cabinet.

"This is really an area where the state needs to have some uniformity," said Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which has represented civil rights groups in court battles to get ex-felons' voting rights restored. "Bush vs. Gore is based on that premise. Jeb Bush said he was going to fix it and it clearly hasn't been fixed."

In July, Hood beat a hasty retreat from a 47,000-name list developed by the state to keep felons from voting. The list could have allowed Hispanic felons more likely, some say, to be Republicans than Democrats to vote. Meanwhile, analyses by Florida newspapers revealed the voting roll purge list contained the names of about 2,000 felons whose voting rights had been restored.

And, while the state does have a system for county elections supervisors to report problems in the wake of an election, the forms used call for subjective answers by local officials. For example, one of the questions on a state Conduct of Election report asks whether any "unusual circumstances" were encountered during an election. "Unusual" varies from county to county.

The mishmash of voting systems around Florida has as much to do with local county commissions as with the state, according to Bill Cowles, Orange County's elections supervisor and president of the state association of elections supervisors. After all, it's the counties that buy the voting equipment.

"If you're going to leave it to the counties to fund something, you can't tell the counties how to do something," he said.

But he defends the system that lets every county in the state have its own elections supervisor.

"You know how diverse the state is," he said. "The best way to reflect that diversity is to have the independent supervisors in each county."