Volusia recount could help ease nation's suspicions

Editorial    News-Journal
Last : November 22, 2004

 

Once again, Volusia County has the unwanted privilege of being the focus of national attention in a presidential election.

Representatives from Black Box Voting, an advocacy group that reviews the accuracy of electronic vote-tabulation machinery, have chosen the county as one of their first challenge areas. Encounters between local elections officials and Black Box members including disputes over election-related documents found in trash bags have both sides feeling bruised and suspicious.

It doesn't have to be this way. Bev Harris, founder of the Seattle-based Black Box Voting, and Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe should have the same interest at heart protecting the integrity of the 229,580 votes cast in the Nov. 2 election. They should be allies, not adversaries.

Many issues drew Harris' attention to Volusia County, foremost among them the glitch in 2000 that caused Al Gore's vote tally here to by 16,000 votes. Then there's the memory-card failure that erased 13,244 votes from a machine at the county's early-voting site in Daytona Beach. (The ballots were re-tabulated and included in the final total.) These are not enough to cast doubt on Volusia's returns, but they are enough to draw a second look. The next step will probably be an in-person inspection of ballots from as many as 50 precincts, a move Harris was still discussing Friday. That inspection could prove (or disprove) a theory that forms the basis of Harris' national reputation. For the past two years, she's been publicly probing the possibility that touch-screen and optical-scan vote-counting systems from the nation's three largest vendors are vulnerable to outside tampering.

It's not a new theory: All three elections-system companies have close ties to the Republican Party. Those ties are, particularly, strong with Diebold, which makes the Accuvote system used in Volusia County. Some supervisors of elections, such as Leon County Supervisor Ion Sancho, have banned vendors from servicing machines as an extra measure of security. Harris believes that the Accuvote systems are vulnerable because they are reprogrammable over phone lines with the right passwords. Diebold officials call that contention outlandish. But, if such a thing were to happen here, it's possible local officials would never even know about it.

Lowe says she can be ready to conduct a hand recount within a few days of learning which precincts Harris wants to inspect. Why not put it to the test? A recount that closely matches the results in the machine tallies would offer strong evidence that the Accuvote system the same one that counted half the votes in the 2004 election nationwide is, indeed, reliable. But serious discrepancies would sound the alarm about an election potentially hijacked. Either way, it's information that elections officials need to know and, either way, as Harris says, Volusia County could end up doing a great service for the country.

Local officials should see this not as a challenge but as an important safeguard to a system that can always use improvement. This isn't the first time an election has been challenged, and it probably won't be the last. But, as Sancho points out, each challenge has the potential to bring more accountability to the system. Ten years ago, he says, it was not uncommon for thousands of votes to be discarded in an election with no notice to voters and no recourse. Today, such a move would be unthinkable an attitude shift that's a direct result of the 2000 challenges and the increased scrutiny that followed them.

In all likelihood, this recount will verify what Lowe has been saying all along: that the machines are accurate and tamper-proof. Either way, it is a blessing in disguise for those voters who are still wondering if their vote really counts.