Volusia will get paperless voting

The touch-screens, for disabled voters, win approval despite misgivings.

By Kevin P. Connolly
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Staff Writer 
April 8 2005

DELAND After a three-hour hearing punctuated by passionate debates about the fallibility of technology, Volusia County Council members Thursday reluctantly agreed to buy touch-screen voting machines, despite lingering concerns about the paperless system.

At one point, County Council members even flirted with the idea of filing a lawsuit against the state or federal government to get out of what they described as an unfair requirement to buy voting machines many people don't trust.

But, faced with a deadline to have disability-accessible machines for elections after July 1, a majority of council members went against the wishes of scores of paperless-voting foes and authorized Election Supervisor Ann McFall to negotiate a contract with Diebold Election Systems for 210 touch-screens.

"I really don't want to buy this equipment," said County Chairman Frank Bruno, who joined Carl Persis to oppose touch-screens, which were approved 5-2. "I feel like we're being forced to buy this equipment. I think that the citizens of Volusia County don't want me to spend the money to buy this equipment."

New laws require McFall and other elections chiefs nationwide to provide equipment for people with disabilities to vote independently.

"We did it," an elated Irene Moses of DeLand said as the advocate for the disabled maneuvered her wheelchair out of the County Council chambers after the vote.

Touch-screens, which can be equipped with an "audio ballot" and headphones so the visually impaired can vote in secret, will supplement Volusia's existing voting system in which voters mark paper ballots that are counted by optical-scanning machines.

Opponents of touch-screens said the high-tech devices could break down or get hacked, and because they don't use paper ballots, there's no way to double check if the electronic votes are correct.

"Are we are going to entrust our democracy to electronic machines that have a history of problems due to machine errors, software errors and human errors?" Susan Pynchon, one of dozens of paperless-voting foes, asked council members.

Pynchon, director of DeLand-based Florida Fair Elections Coalition, found an ally in retired Volusia County Judge Michael McDermott, who suggested council members fight the mandate with a lawsuit and call for a federal investigation.

T. Wayne Bailey, a veteran Stetson University political science professor, warned council members not to cross a "major line" by buying paperless machines. He urged them to "preserve that fundamental principle that goes back way, way, way before computers" about not conducting elections "without some means of auditing."

Pynchon noted a recent controversy in Miami-Dade, an all touch-screen county, in which a programming mistake with machines made by Elections Systems and Software resulted in as many as 477 lost votes during the March 8 slot-machine referendum. County officials said the Diebold machine McFall wants can't make a similar mistake.

In jurisdictions that switched to Diebold touch-screens, problems have ped dramatically, said Mark Radke, director of marketing for Diebold Elections Systems.

Radke also told council members Diebold is getting a device approved that could be attached to the touch-screen and produce a voter-verifiable paper trail. Council members expressed a strong interest in buying the equipment when it gets approved for use in Florida.

Doug Hall, a blind Daytona Beach resident and a disability advocate, said visually impaired people have waited long enough to vote independently.

"We've had delay after delay after delay with this, and we're tired of the delays," he said.

Doug Towne, a Largo-based consultant on disability issues for the state Division of Elections, told council members that paperless-voting foes were incorrectly raising concerns that touch-screens were "somehow endangering democracy."

"Quite the contrary. Accessible voting is probably the best example of inclusion to come along in recent years short of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That's what this is about," he said.

Fifteen of Florida's 67 counties, including Lake, use touch-screens as their main voting system. The remaining counties primarily use optical-scanning systems, though some have bought supplemental touch-screens to comply with new disability rules to have at least one in each precinct.

McFall said she didn't know exactly how much the machines would cost until she negotiates an agreement with Diebold, though the estimate is about $700,000 to $1 million. Most of the cost would come from federal funds.