Thursday, July 29, 2004
The votes from the 2002 election had been counted before the computer crashes.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- In the latest blow to Florida's increasingly embattled election system, state and local officials scrambled Wednesday to try to salvage election records wiped out during a computer crash in the state's biggest county.
Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent an investigator to Miami-Dade County, and county election officials brought in a university consultant to try to figure out what went wrong when records of the 2002 Democratic primary vote for governor vanished last year.
Coming just months before the 2004 presidential vote in Florida, the incident raised new fears among Republicans and Democrats alike about the electronic voting systems used in 15 counties with more than half of the state's population.
In the wake of the disclosure of the erased records, election reform groups want an audit in more than a dozen counties during Florida's Aug. 31 primary.
State officials insisted Wednesday that auditing wasn't necessary because all touch-screen votes were counted during the 2002 gubernatorial primary election, even though records of the votes were lost during computer crashes last year. Some records of other elections also were believed lost.
A coalition of election groups contends the problem, however, could be indicative of further problems with the machines -- and the only way to know for certain that votes are cast, tabulated and reported accurately is if an audit is done during a live election. They want the state to audit touch-screen voting machines in 15 counties.
Disagreement
Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jeb. Bush, who oversees the secretary of state's elections office, called the records loss "a great concern," but stressed that the election records were lost from a county computer where they had been transferred, not from voting machines.
"It has nothing to do with the voting equipment," Bratina said. "They'd already been taken off of the voting system."
But others disagreed, saying that older voting systems automatically keep multiple backups of the original data -- often in the form of paper ballots -- so records are not lost even if numbers in another computer get zapped.