Watchdog group urges voting system audit

A Miami-Dade watchdog group wants the governor to order an independent check on voting machines around the state before the next election.

BY MARY ELLEN KLAS

meklas@herald.com

TALLAHASSEE - A Miami-Dade elections watchdog organization is traveling to the state capital today to turn up the heat on the governor: The group wants him to order a statewide audit of voting systems to check if the machines will work on Election Day.

The Miami-Dade Elections Reform Coalition will ask Gov. Jeb Bush to order the Legislature to earmark money for an audit of both the touch-screen and optical-scan voting systems before the Aug. 31 election.

State law allows the Legislature to require ''an independent audit of the voting system in any county.'' Coalition members are seeking the audit because they believe glitches discovered in the audit trail on iVotronic touch-screen machines in use in Miami-Dade, Broward and nine other counties may be evidence of a broader problem.

The coalition, which will be joined in the announcement by the League of Women Voters and the ACLU of Florida, also wants a random audit of some optical-scan machines.

Touch-screen machines are used in 15 of Florida's 67 counties. Eleven of the counties use iVotronic machines, which are manufactured by Electronic Systems & Software of Nebraska. Tests performed by election officials in Miami-Dade and Lee counties have found the machines to have occasional flaws in their audit logs when data is downloaded onto a flash card, or temporary file.

State election officials have downplayed the significance of the machine flaw, saying a remedy is being worked out and that the problem has no effect on the final vote count.

But the election watchdog group fears that if the state's testing and monitoring system did not expose the bugs in the audit system, it may have failed to detect others.

''The certification process certainly didn't work in Dade County,'' said Sandy Wayland, legislative chairman for the coalition that was formed after the controversial 2002 primary.

''If they found it in this machine, it's a state problem, not just a citywide problem,'' Wayland said.

In 1996, the Legislature repealed a law that required county elections officials to conduct an audit of voting equipment every five years because there was no money to pay for the audits, Wayland said.