Group wants check of state's voting systems

By Nancy Cook Lauer

DEMOCRAT CAPITOL BUREAU CHIEF

A Miami group is asking Gov. Jeb Bush to order a statewide, independent audit of voting systems, following a county employee's discovery of ballot-counting irregularities there.

The Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition said computer glitches causing vote tallies to be wrong in two elections last year justify a return to statewide audits that look at how voting machinery, processes and personnel work on election night.

The group includes citizen activists, the local League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Their request drew a strong response from Bush spokesman Jacob DiPietre.

"We are not going to engage in every accusation du jour from people whose goal it is to undermine voter confidence," DiPietre said. "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State, election supervisors and the staffers who are working to ensure a fair and seamless election, and the voter should, too."

The glitches were in touch-screen iVotronic equipment by Elections Systems & Software, but the coalition says all counties using touch-screen voting machines and a random sample of those using the paper ballots should be audited. Florida law once required that all systems be audited every five years, but the Legislature never provided money for it and it was repealed in 1996.

The "problems we uncovered in Miami-Dade should be a warning to the rest of the state," said Sandy Wayland, legislative chair of the group. "The time to heed the warning is now, while we can still do something about it."

Dropped votes

The system failed to record 38 votes in two machines during a May 2003 North Miami Beach municipal runoff election, according to Orlando Suarez, division director for Miami-Dade County's information technology office.

What Suarez found most troubling was that the 38 missing votes turned up in a tally for a machine that wasn't used during that election. The machines are identified by their serial numbers.

There were similar problems in an October 2003 election, where five machines ped 162 votes.

The company didn't respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Wayland said Bush should find the money - and call a special session of the Legislature if necessary - to hire auditors to evaluate the Aug. 31 primary election. It's uncertain how much it would cost to audit the 15 counties that use touch-screen systems and a sample of the counties that don't.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who learned about the problems from a newspaper article just last month, has ordered an investigation. She said in a May 13 letter to Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan that she was "disturbed" that the required report to her office on the conduct of elections never mentioned the problems.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said he's never experienced a state audit in the 16 years he has run elections here. He said he would "have no problem" with one now.