Touch-screen voting
Flagler's decision compounds problems

Editorial    Daytona News-Journal    July 11, 2005

In the last week of June, Peggy Rae Border, Flagler County's Supervisor of Elections, requested and received $173,000 from the County Commission to buy 43 touch-screen voting machines, one for each of the county's 38 precincts. The machines won't replace Flagler's optical-scan voting system but add to it to give some disabled people the opportunity to vote privately. The machines are manufactured by Diebold Elections Systems Inc. And they produce no paper trail. If the machines malfunction at election time, there is no way to verify an electronically recorded vote against printed proof. The only verification system is the machine's own computer memory chips.

Computers are not infallible, and touch-screen machines have failed in actual elections enough times that Miami-Dade County, for example, may junk its $24.5 million investment in the technology. Border's decision nevertheless to rely on touch-screen technology in Flagler is an unfortunate concession to potential failures at a time when every supervisor should be striving for minimizing voting fiascoes, not planting the seeds for more.

Border is under pressure to comply with state law, which requires counties to have systems in place accommodating disabled voters by July 1. The law also requires that those systems be certified by the state. Diebold's is one of three systems certified. But none of the three companies on the list manufactures machines that provide a paper trail. So the state's mandate is not exactly challenge-proof. To the contrary. It forces local election supervisors into a corner while failing to achieve the law's stated aim equal protection for all voters.

Still, Border should have followed Volusia County's example, where the County Council chose to take a stand rather than let itself be cornered. The council refused to approve a $782,185 contract with Diebold despite threats of a lawsuit now pending in federal court. The issue is ripe for a court test. Members of the American Civil Liberties Union tried to make that point at a June 30 Palm Coast town meeting chaired by Jim O'Connell, the newest member of the Flagler County Commission. They got nowhere.

Misinformation is part of the problem. The absence of touch-screen machines hasn't kept the disabled from voting in the past. It won't keep them from voting in the future except that supervisors of elections face a Jan. 1, 2006, federal deadline to provide the disabled with alternatives to conventional voting methods. The problem in Florida has been the absence of reliable alternatives. Given state-imposed limits on alternatives, the added convenience should be balanced against the machines' unproven reliability. If dubious election results are the price of convenience, the price isn't worth paying.

There's also some misinformation at the other end. It isn't as if other voting methods, including optical scans (which rely on computer technology) are tamper-proof or infallible. It isn't as if paper ballots can't be tampered with, corrupted or lost. Indeed, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Voting Technology Project estimated that up to 6 million votes may have been lost to a string of errors in 2000 in the voter registration process to poorly designed ballots in the voting booth to misplaced ballots in counting rooms all before the advent of touch-screen technology.

But that only underscores the challenge election supervisors face. Adding to potential errors is certainly not their mission. Minimizing them is, even at the occasional cost of a convenience or two. Flagler County has decided to play it unsafe (and did so hastily, at a commission meeting where the voting-machine issue had barely been publicly advertised). Yet the county isn't bound to plug-in its mistake at election time. There's time to rethink its decision to let touch-screen machines into the county's 38 precincts. And there's plenty of cause to challenge the state's mandate forcing supervisors into the unenviable position they face. Honest democratic machinery is not the least of it.