Voter advocates, state struggle to make best touch-screen voting

BRENDAN FARRINGTON

Associated Press  12 October 2004

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Groups upset over the inability to recount touch-screen ballots offered suggestions Tuesday on what to do if the presidential election is as close as it was in 2000, conceding that nothing can be done this year to physically recount computer ballots.

Instead, activists want the 15 counties that use touch-screen voting machines to give voters the option of using a paper ballot. They also want to create a process to make sure all votes cast match the number of people who voted and have a court oversee a recount if necessary.

"We can't fix it completely for 2004, there's no doubt about that, but we certainly can set up a system that helps us get farther than they are right now," said Alma Gonzalez, a lawyer representing the groups. "We can't keep having deja vu. We have to stop."

Gonzalez outlined the groups' proposal in a meeting Tuesday with Department of State officials, who provided them with preliminary recount proposal they're drafting. The state suggests that election workers scan through ballot images to count the number of ballots in which no candidate was chosen, which is known as an undervote.

But the state doesn't have a suggestion on what to do if election workers and the touch-screen machines come up with a different number of undervotes.

Touch-screen critics question whether undervotes are truly a choice by the voter not to pick a candidate or a case of computers losing the votes.

The state's proposal doesn't include allowing voters to choose between voting on a computer or paper.

The groups, which included the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way Foundation and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, successfully sued the state to overturn an elections rule stating that touch-screen ballots don't have to be included in a manual recount.

State law requires a manual recount if the election is decided by less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the vote.

That was the case in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush defeated Vice President Al Gore by 537 votes out of 6 million cast. Thousands of punch card ballots were scrutinized for dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads during five weeks of recounts that were eventually halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, thus giving Bush the presidency.

The court criticized the state for not having uniform measures in place to conduct a recount. The state tried to solve the problem by getting rid of punch card ballots and allowing counties to use touch-screen machines, which more than half of Florida's 9.8 million registered voters will be eligible to use on Nov. 2. The others will vote on paper optical scan ballots.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., has also filed a separate lawsuit trying to force supervisors to create a paper trial of touch-screen voting. Wexler, whose attorney has acknowledged that there's no time to put a system in place to print receipts of each touch-screen vote, will the lawsuit if the state accepts the group's proposal, Gonzalez said.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, told Department of State attorney Richard Perez that the ACLU and other activist groups are simply trying to minimize confusion over a 2004 recount, and improve procedures in future elections.

"We're looking at a range of lousy solutions three weeks before an election," Simon said. "The discussion we're having now is not the discussion we should be having in the future. Right now, we're looking for the best Band-Aid."

Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the Miami-Dade County elections office, questioned the value of making major changes to the recount process three weeks before the election.

"We have a system that does work. We just had a very successful election on Aug. 31. It's not a blind expression of faith that things will go well - things have gone well. We will of course be open to making changes in the future. We're just not sure if making changes in the election now would be more of a service or disservice to our voters."