Thanks to smooth voting, Flori-duh fades into history

By Linda Kleindienst
Tallahassee Bureau Chief
Posted November 4 2004

TALLAHASSEE It's Flori-duh no more.

After suffering a black eye and becoming the favorite joke of late-night comedians in the 2000 election, Florida has bounced back.

Although Tuesday's election may not have been completely flawless, it has won kudos from a bipartisan election commission, Republicans and Democrats. It was a vast improvement, they say, over four years ago, when Florida voters made "chad" part of the American lexicon while forcing the nation to wait five weeks to learn who had won the presidency.

Only days ago, retiring U.S. Sen. Bob Graham groused that he is tired of Florida being the laughingstock of the nation.

"We've had a very big, smelly monkey on our back for four years," he said.

On Wednesday, Gov. Jeb Bush announced that the monkey is gone.

"The election went well and I think all the passions of 2000 will subside," he said. "With this huge an election, with so many people voting and it working so well clearly, no matter what the odor of the monkey is, it's off our back."

While Fort Lauderdale lawyer Charles Lichtman, lead attorney for John Kerry's Florida campaign team, would have preferred to see his candidate win, he nonetheless said he was "extremely proud" of how the state election was run.

"It was a clean election. ? The electoral process worked in Florida," said Lichtman, who led a team of 3,200 lawyers. "My mission was focused on voter participation. We won that battle and lost the war."

But Common Cause, a national government watchdog and election reform group, received more than 19,000 calls from Florida voters having problems placing Florida third behind New York and Pennsylvania. More than one-fourth of those calls, 5,904, came from Broward voters complaining they never received requested absentee ballots. Others reported poorly trained poll workers and voter registration problems.

"If the election had been as close as it was in 2000, that would have become a huge problem," said Ben Wilcox, director of Common Cause Florida, referring to the president's 537-vote victory four years ago. "I don't think everyone should turn a blind eye to some of these issues."

Still, Secretary of State Glenda Hood insisted that Tuesday's election "restored the integrity of the process."

Not to say the state wasn't prepared for trouble.

Hood, Florida's chief elections official and a political appointee of Bush, had her attorneys on hand Tuesday to answer any legal challenges that might be filed. Officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement provided security at the front door to the Department of State and Tallahassee police officers patrolled the grounds, monitoring traffic and about 100 members of the state, national and foreign press. An area for protests was set aside and a Florida Highway Patrol car blocked a driveway into the Florida Supreme Court building, where thousands protested in 2000.

But, unlike four years ago when supporters of George W. Bush and Al Gore descended on Florida's capital along with dozens of television satellite trucks and hundreds of reporters from around the world, all was quiet at the state elections office on Wednesday.

"In this election, Florida proved the democratic process is alive and well," said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission established by Congress two years ago through the Help America Vote Act.

"We've been saying there would be two elections. The first a referendum on the presidency, the second a referendum on the process," he said. "The process has won."

Once the symbol for a "challenged electoral process," Soaries said the state has now become the flagship for change.

Embarrassed by the controversy of 2000, the governor appointed a bipartisan commission of 10 Democrats, 10 Republicans and one independent to make recommendations for change.

The final report resulted in the nation's most wide-ranging reforms. Florida quickly outlawed punch-card ballots, mandated a uniform state ballot, funded better poll worker training and voter education and allowed for early voting and provisional ballots.

Some parts of the law need to be tweaked, Bush conceded on Wednesday. He'd like to protect early voters from having to run the gantlet of political operatives on the way to the voting booth. And, when the technology is available, he'd like to upgrade the touch-screen voting machines to provide recounts.

But Bush said the election reforms passed in 2001 gave people in Florida confidence that their vote would count this time around.

"We had 7.5 million votes cast, probably over 70 percent turnout, phenomenal turnout. And you could probably count on two hands the problems," Bush said. "It is impossible to have perfection."