And you thought picking a candidate was the hard part

By Joel Engelhardt

Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Early voting is not a panacea. Palm Beach County residents know that now after senior citizens, urged to vote early by John Kerry, waited hours in line last week. Many left in disgust without casting a ballot.

Absentee ballots are not a panacea. Residents learned in the weeks leading up to this first presidential election in the era of touch-screen machines that voters make as many or more mistakes on the unchecked mail-in ballots as they do when they show up at the polls.
Electronic voting is not a panacea. Voters worry because a system that once assigned their franchise to Pat Buchanan now could let their wishes escape into cyberspace. U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, who sued to require paper printouts for voter review, is suggesting switching to optical-scan ballots, the kind used in 52 Florida counties, including St. Lucie.

Now he tells us. Florida's three biggest counties, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, all made the multimillion-dollar switch to touch screens. Palm Beach alone spent $14 million. Martin County gave up its reliable 800-pound mechanical lever machines to invest $2.7 million in electronic voting.

And still, voters don't know whom to trust. Gone are the punch-card ballots that caused Palm Beach County such misery in 2000. No longer is it enough to warn voters to remove those little hanging chads. In fact, about half of Florida voters won't get closer to the ballot than the thick glass of the touch screen. So why has the simple act of voting gotten so complicated? What can voters do to pick a president without accidentally choosing an extremist or disqualifying their ballot? And how will they know some master hacker isn't making the ultimate decision?

Florida's Republican-dominated state government blames the Democrats. It's not about system failure, leading Republicans say. It's about unprovoked attacks that cause the public to lose faith in a good system.

Democrats have picked apart the system in a series of lawsuits intent on avoiding a repeat of 2000. In their zealousness to be better prepared this time, and in recognition that a preponderance of the votes lost during an election are cast by the low-income, less-educated voters who make up their base, the Democrats have raised issues that in the past were ignored.

As most of America focuses on who's winning the presidential election on Nov. 2, Florida's election system itself will be on trial. Voters can make sure they do their part to pass the test. After four years, the system, still hotly debated, is in place, like it or not. Here's what to watch for when you cast your vote and why, no matter what method you use, someone, somewhere will find something wrong with it.

Early voting

Starting last Monday, Floridians have been able to go to ed polling places and avoid the long lines of Election Day. Political parties love it because they have two weeks to make sure that supporters vote. Election officials hate it because it requires extra manpower and is harder to control.

State law maintains that voters can cast votes only in the precinct where they live. But that doesn't matter with early voting. Voters go to central polling places, where election officials in Palm Beach County, for example, must determine which of 155 types of ballots to hand them. Early voters get different ballots because of the overlapping districts for county, state and federal races. It takes more time for election workers to link voters with the correct ballot at an early-voting location than it does when voters show up at their precinct on Election Day.

When crowds lined up on the first day of early voting, they had to wait. Election supervisors, including Palm Beach County's Theresa LePore, also have been criticized for not setting up enough early voting locations. She set up eight but didn't put one near predominantly black voters in Riviera Beach. For Ms. LePore, who set up polling places within a few miles of Riviera Beach, it's a no-win situation. For black voters worried that too many of their votes didn't count four years ago, it's another blemish.

Absentee voting

When you vote absentee, remember to pick just one presidential candidate. It may seem as though that should go without saying, but voters have made that mistake. When they fill out the optical-scan absentee ballots at home, the mistake is more likely to go unnoticed because it won't be checked by a card reader before it is cast. Unchecked optical scan ballots accounted for the highest margin of error in the 2000 presidential election — yes, higher than the infamous punch-card ballot.

The error rate was so high that the state forced counties to buy card readers for every precinct. Voters now must feed the optical-scan ballots through a reader before leaving the polling place. That approach results in the lowest margin of error. Absentee voters have no card readers. But they're voting in record numbers. Expect absentee ballot mistakes in record numbers, too.

Electronic voting

Palm Beach and Martin county voters who show up at the polls on Nov. 2 undoubtedly have heard that the system is prone to hacking. What they should also know is that a hacker in Palm Beach County would have to get at 5,000 machines, none connected to anything by Internet. Or the hacker would have to access the machines in the weeks before the elections, when workers are programming them, then sealing them shut before they are shipped to polling places. Or the hacker must personally slip into a restricted computer room within the county's main elections office because, once again, those machines have no connection to the outside world.

Provisional ballots

Or, voters can set those fears aside, go to the correct polling place and vote. Underline the phrase "correct polling place." The state created provisional ballots to let voters with disputed registration cast a ballot. But the Florida Supreme Court ruled last week that the vote won't count if voters are in the wrong place. In 2000, phone lines were jammed, blocking workers from reaching the main voter database to determine where voters should be. An uncounted number lost the right to vote. This time, workers in Palm Beach County will have cellphones and laptop computers. If voters with registration problems heed the advice of precinct workers, they should be able to cast proper votes.

Undervotes

The computerized touch screen offers another advantage over four years ago, when 19,000 Palm Beach County voters cast ballots for more than one presidential candidate, called an overvote. Touch-screen machines won't let voters pick more than one candidate. The machines still will allow voters to skip a race, the so-called undervotes that accounted for another 10,000 discarded ballots in 2000. Some claim that the undervotes indicate machine error. Others say harried or confused voters didn't realize they skipped a race. The best bet is to read every screen carefully. If you missed a race, the screen will let you know and tell you how to go back and fix it.

Recounts

Despite precautions, some undervotes will be cast. The state made sure that election reform eliminated the prospect of a 2000-like order for a statewide hand recount of every ballot cast. Instead, the law limits a hand recount to undervotes and overvotes in races decided by less than 0.25 percent. The state has no good way, though, to reproduce undervotes cast on touch-screen machines. Rep. Wexler's lawsuit didn't get a hearing until last week, too late for the courts to impose a solution.

One quick fix would force election workers to match the number of voters who sign in with the number counted by the machines. The goal is to make sure — during the election when it isn't too late to do something about it — that a machine isn't going haywire. Election supervisors, including Ms. LePore, say even that simple step is too much to consider.