Voting failure may prompt suit
County to meet with state officials
By Jeff Burlew and Bill Cotterell
DEMOCRAT STAFF WRITERS

 

Threatening a lawsuit over Leon County's failure to get voting machines for disabled citizens by a state deadline, Secretary of State Sue Cobb summoned county officials Thursday to a meeting next week to explain themselves.

"As you know, we have the authority to file suit to enforce state law," Cobb told Commission Chairman Bill Proctor.

In a letter to Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, she did not mention going to court but said County Attorney Herb Thiele notified the state of "a potential problem with the contingency plan" Sancho proposed for getting the equipment. Cobb invited Sancho and Proctor to her office for a session with Division of Elections Director Dawn Roberts at 11 a.m. Monday "to discuss the county's progress in timely procuring a certified accessible voting system" for the 2006 elections.

Sancho, who said he welcomed the meeting with Cobb, had tried to get the voting equipment by the deadline, but all three companies certified to sell the equipment in Florida refused to do business with him. He says he's being blacklisted by the companies, and he has questioned whether there's a movement afoot to get him out of office.

Sancho is in talks with the Louisville, Ky.,-based company IVS for its "Inspire Vote-by-Phone" device, which has a telephone-like device for blind voters to use at their precincts. Sancho turned to IVS after the companies certified to sell voting equipment refused to do business with him.

After the county missed a deadline for purchasing the equipment, it had to return state funding.

"It is cost-effective," said Sancho, adding that the price for the IVS system would be under $600,000. "It would not have high recurring maintenance costs. It would be simple for the citizens and election workers to use, complement our existing optical-scan system and be 100-percent paper verified."

But the IVS equipment is not state-certified, which can take months. Gail Hart, a spokeswoman for IVS, said the company will seek certification soon.

"We would hope that it would be as quick as possible," she said.

Sancho plans to tout IVS to Cobb's office today and to county commissioners in a Tuesday workshop. Cobb said in her letters to Proctor and Sancho that she wanted to meet with them before the county workshop.

The IVS system already is used by more than 2 million voters in the Northeast, Sancho said.

Last year, Sancho and others hacked into the county's Diebold optical-scan system and found that election results could be tampered with via memory cards. They found that any voter fraud would have to be an inside job. Diebold has disputed the findings.

Since then, the three companies certified in Florida - Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems and Software, and Sequoia Voting Systems - have declined to sell equipment to Leon County.

Sancho has said he feels blacklisted and that companies don't want him looking closely at their equipment. Diebold objected that he conducted the tests without consulting them. The other two companies said they didn't have enough product or support staff to take on a new client like Leon County.

Sancho missed a Jan. 1 deadline to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act, which requires equipment for people with disabilities in every voting location. That caused the county to return more than $560,000 in grant money for the equipment and prompted Cobb to set a May 1 deadline.