Voting machines under fire
Miami-Dade leaders asked to dump 3-year-old machines and buy new units.  
The Associated Press     June 1, 2005

MIAMI Miami-Dade County's elections chief has strongly recommended that its ATM-style voting machines be ditched for optical-scan ones that use paper ballots, another black mark for the devices that were billed as a way to avoid a repeat of the 2000 presidential-election fiasco.

Elections Supervisor Lester Sola said in a memo Friday that he reached his conclusion based on declining voter confidence in the paperless touch-screen machines and election-day labor costs that have quadrupled with them.

County Manager George Burgess forwarded Sola's report to county commissioners, who must decide whether to get rid of the machines. But Burgess cautioned that he must give a careful review to Sola's recommendation to get rid of the machines that the county bought for $24.5 million three years ago.

The county would be the first place in the nation to ditch the iVotronics machines for paper-based balloting, said a spokesman for Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., the company that makes the devices.

"In fact, to the contrary, jurisdictions around the country have increasingly seen the value of the iVotronic technology," Ken Fields said.

The machines were heralded as the best way to ensure Miami-Dade would never again bring the nation's election process to a halt. The county was mired in legal fights over hanging and dimpled chads on punch-card ballots in the race that George W. Bush eventually won by 537 votes.