The hanging chad is history.

You won't find a punch-card voting machine or a butterfly ballot in the state. Except, that is, on display in museums as a bitter reminder of Election 2000 - a 36-day odyssey that placed Florida's hodgepodge elections procedure under a global microscope.

"It will take decades for Florida to live down the 2000 election," says Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho. "It will take the next decade of error-free elections. We need to create the best voting system and process in the country."

The state has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past three years to replace error-prone equipment with new systems that make it much harder - if not impossible - to vote improperly. All of it is in preparation for 2004, when Florida is again expected to be the swing state in what could be another down-to-the-wire presidential contest.

With Election Day less than a year away, will Florida be ready?

"We will be ready. The state as a whole will be ready by 2004," said Ed Kast, director of the state Division of Elections. "We've got a lot of work going on, but we'll be ready."

Yet a three-month Tallahassee Democrat examination also found trouble spots - primarily in Florida's largest metropolitan areas - that could erupt in chaos, giving the state for all practical purposes a sense of "deja vote."

The latest sign that Florida hasn't shaken the ghost of 2000 came Thursday, when Gov. Jeb Bush suspended Broward County Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant, saying she mismanaged her office.
While elections equipment itself isn't expected to be the issue, a shortage of trained poll workers and a voting populace unaccustomed to the new procedures could, once again, have critics renaming the state "Florid-duh."

It is not yet certain whether poll workers will be ready to handle the complex voting machinery and whether there will be enough trained poll workers available to ensure that polling places will open on time and stay open until the official closing time, a problem in recent elections.

Moreover, Florida has failed to establish a central voter registration database, a key element of federal reforms enacted after the 2000 election fiasco. The database is important because it determines who gets to vote - and who is turned away from the polls - on Election Day.

Florida will miss a federally mandated deadline to set up the database - and will ask for an extension until 2006. State officials hope to mitigate the potential problems using a new provisional ballot that will allow voters to vote conditionally if they come to the proper precinct and their name isn't on the rolls.

Sweeping changes evident

Florida has spent about $35 million over the past three years replacing problematic voting equipment, educating voters and poll workers and standardizing ballots, recount procedures and registration systems. And, to some degree, it has worked. The 2002 elections saw uncounted ballots decrease from 2.93 percent in 2000 to .86 percent.

"If 2002 is any indication, it appears Florida is ready to go," said Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida political science professor and Gov. Jeb Bush appointee who's considered an expert on Florida elections.

More than a year after Florida's landmark Election Reform Act, President George W. Bush in October 2002 signed the Help America Vote Act. HAVA, as it's called, sets even stricter standards than Florida set in some cases and promises more than $3 billion in federal aid to states over the next three years.

Florida has received about $23 million this fiscal year and has dumped about $12 million back into the treasury to partially reimburse itself for money it had already sent to the counties.

"Quite frankly the HAVA, in my opinion, does not really help the voters in the state of Florida. It helps the rest of the states, but Florida's already ahead of them," said Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore. "Florida has really jumped ahead of the curve with the things they have implemented."

The focus of the most interest - and by far the biggest chunk of the budget - has been election machinery. Florida's 67 counties are now using one of five systems that have been certified by the state Division of Elections. Gone are the punch-card and lever machines. Gone is the optical scan machinery that tallied votes in a central county location, denying voters the chance to fix flawed ballots.

Instead, all equipment is either the new touch-screen technology, or the more familiar optical-scan equipment, this time tallied right in the polling place - as used in Leon County. The law requires all systems to give voters a chance to redo or correct their ballots two times if they make a mistake on the original.

A vivid memory

The butterfly ballot is still fresh in the mind of voter Charlotte Nash, 74, of Boca Raton. The ballot, designed by LePore to make it easier for elderly voters to read, made her county the brunt of the late-night talk-show jokes. The ballot prompted early calls for a recount, with Democrats charging it cost candidate Al Gore thousands of votes.

"It stopped me. I didn't know I was supposed to vote for vice president," Nash said at a meeting of the League of Women Voters in Delray Beach. "But I think I got it right."

The display of an old Palm Beach County voting machine, complete with the infamous butterfly ballot, draws mild interest from a group of retirees on a recent tour of the Old Capitol in Tallahassee. Thomasville, Ga., resident Jim Bailey, president of the Florida Panhandlers, can't understand the confusion.

"What's so hard about this?" Bailey asked. "I have voted with that system in the past. You just need to take your time to read the ballot, and if you have a problem - that's what the people at the voting precincts are there for, to help you."

Most of the new equipment flew through its first test with flying colors, with only a few machine-related problems during the 2002 election. But election officials aren't about to rest on their laurels.

They know a presidential election brings out more voters, many of whom will be experiencing the new equipment for the first time. Statewide, 55 percent of registered voters turned out for the 2002 elections, compared to 70 percent in the 2000 presidential one.

But problems with more than machinery were evident in the election that inspired a 36-day presidential standoff three years ago. Confused voters, lost ballots, faulty data on who was eligible to vote and ill-prepared poll workers all contributed to the election that cast a cloud over the Sunshine State.

"Regardless of what kind of voting system you have, if the voters don't know how to use it and poll workers aren't trained properly, you're going to have problems," notes Pinellas County Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark.

Is Florida ready to help choose the next president? Sancho thinks so, but he still has some reservations. Most problematic, in Sancho's eyes, are Broward and Miami-Dade counties, two of the four Florida counties whose recounts became embroiled in lawsuits in 2000 and which continued to have problems two years later.

"I think Florida is ready. My main concern is the situation in South Florida - Miami-Dade and Broward County," Sancho said. "They were basically bailed out by a huge influx of county funds. It seems to me, without the same level of support from the counties, they will be in the same situation as they were in the 2002 election."

Indeed, those two counties account for about 21 percent of all the state's registered voters, a not inconsequential chunk when the last presidential election was decided by 537 votes.

Among election hot spots, and what's being done to remedy their ills:

Broward County: Supervisor of Elections Miriam Oliphant fired a rash of employees following extensive problems in 2002 - but it wasn't enough to save her own job.

Oliphant was furious that county commissioners rejected her recommendation for new voting equipment and instead, ed machines that she says are more expensive and harder to use.

"All this money they used, and I could have been training poll workers with that," Oliphant said. "Poll workers can make you or break you."

That proved true in 2002, when a combination of poll workers not showing up and equipment not working properly caused polls to open late in six cities. Voters waited more than three hours to vote in suburban Miramar, and poll workers closed the polls early in other precincts. In Hollywood, workers at one precinct held the door shut and cursed at voters.

Later, Oliphant learned that 268 absentee ballots weren't counted at all, a problem that surfaced far too late to include them in the final tallies.

"There are no words that can adequately describe the deep sadness and humiliation I feel concerning the discovery of absentee ballots that did not get counted in the November 2002 election," Oliphant said in an Aug. 29 letter to constituents.

But that didn't end the problems. In a Nov. 4 election by mail, 17,000 of the 100,000 ballots sent out were undeliverable because of bad addresses, and some households got multiple ballots, according to a report Thursday by Secretary of State Glenda Hood.

Hood twice sent a team to help Oliphant work through staffing and other management issues before recommending that Gov. Jeb Bush suspend Oliphant.

"Ms. Oliphant may be content with failure," Bush said in a letter accompanying the executive order suspending her. "She may ignore her fundamental duty to protect every citizen's right to vote, I will not."

But Oliphant had maintained the office was fixing its problems, and she was optimistic that 2004 would go smoothly.

"We've got a lot of work to do," she acknowledged to the Democrat during an October interview. "I have to keep my eyes on the prize, and the prize are the voters of Broward County."

Miami-Dade County: Like Broward, Miami-Dade struggled with its new election machinery in 2002, with voters giving up when machines were down for five hours in one precinct and turned on late in others. Problems in the 2002 primary were so rampant that gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno sued to keep the polls open an extra two hours.

Citing problems in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, both Gov. Bush and then-Secretary of State Jim Smith called upon U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to help the state rectify its voting problems.

But Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan reported no problems in municipal elections earlier this month that covered about one-third of the county. She was appointed by Miami-Dade county commissioners in June to replace longtime supervisor David Leahy, who resigned shortly after the 2002 elections.

Kaplan said she's concentrating on voter outreach and poll-worker training before 2004.

"We have a lot of improvements I still would like to implement," Kaplan said. "My goal is to get progressively better and better at erasing a lot of the perceptions that are plaguing the county."
Palm Beach County: Punch-card machines and butterfly ballots, the focal point of the 2000 recount battle, have been replaced with touch-screen equipment. The machines proved themselves in the 2002 elections, but problems with poll workers marred what would have otherwise been a smooth election.

Some poll workers didn't show up at all - and poll workers in one precinct shut the machines off early because they wanted to go home, forcing voters to use paper ballots in the final two hours.

Elections Supervisor LePore ruefully acknowledges that, come 2004, CNN will once again "be camping on my doorstep." At a recent League of Women Voters meeting in Delray Beach, LePore paced in front of a crowded room at the South County Convention Center, steeling herself for the onslaught of questions to come.

And she took some heat. Sheila Rothman, vice president of the Boynton Beach Democrats, said the atmosphere surrounding elections "seems to discourage people from voting."

"We have a lot of unhappy, nervous people here in Palm Beach County," Rothman told LePore. "Is there something that can be done so the voters of Palm Beach County trust that their votes counted?"

LePore got a bit defensive.

"Hopefully after last year was such a success, we've started calming down the small, vocal minority planting doubts in people's minds," LePore said. "They do a real disservice doing that. It gets people all worked up and some may not come to vote."

Gadsden County: This rural Panhandle county had a greater percentage of its ballots thrown out in 2000 than any other county. But Supervisor of Elections Shirley Knight is proud that the 12-percent error rate in 2000 was whittled to 1 percent in 2002. New optical-scan voting equipment that rejects spoiled ballots and gives voters another chance is probably most responsible.

But voter education played a big part as well, Knight said. She's launched an aggressive educational campaign, training and registering high-schoolers right in the schools, and sending materials home with elementary-school students for their parents to read.

"I'm very strong on voter education," Knight said. "Not just teaching them how to mark the ballot, but I tell them the voting periods and how important it is to vote. I like to start voter education at a very early age."

Volusia County: Supervisor of Elections Deanie Lowe is confident she made the right choice when switching to precinct-level optical-scan equipment in 1995. The equipment has proved its accuracy in recent recounts where candidates were separated by as little as one vote. Still, Volusia, along with Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, was sued by Democrats to force recounts in the 2000 election, likely because Volusia is a primarily Democratic county.

"We've had our share of close races in Volusia County," Lowe said. "But every time, the machines have worked beautifully."

Hillsborough County: Some 5,500 Hillsborough voters had their ballots thrown out in the 2000 election, when the punch-card machinery failed to register their votes.

New touch-screen technology has replaced the old equipment, and supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson is also counting on early voting - allowing voters to vote in the elections office for two weeks before Election Day - to relieve some of the pressure from busy polling places. Voter education and poll-worker training programs are also going full-bore, he said.

"The vision is to create a competent, confident voter - competent in the issues and the equipment and confident that their vote counts," Johnson said.

Sancho sympathized with larger counties' struggles to manage the logistics of elections when so many people come to the polls.

"Leon County is a voting paradise. It's small enough to handle with a smaller staff," Sancho said. "When you have more than half a million voters, you really start getting into trouble. There are more voters in Miami-Dade than the entire state of Montana. It requires a level of expertise that we've never had in elections before."