Florida makes case again for upgrading election machines

Florida makes case again for upgrading election machines
Florida, with its butterfly ballots and its hanging chads, showed the nation why it was time to look for an alternative to punchcard voting systems.
Now, the state that boasts that it is in the forefront of the conversion to touchscreen voting has demonstrated why voters should be demanding and election officials should be scrambling to provide a paper trail for every vote cast.
For a period of time this week, officials in the Miami-Dade County election office admitted that a computer crash erased records from the county's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines and that backup records could not be found.
Eventually, officials announced that the records were found on a compact disc in the office, and Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the elections supervisor office, said, "We are very pleased."
Records of an election are lost, no one knows where the verifying data is for days, and, in fact, believed at the time that no back-up existed, and election officials are pleased?
This is no way to run elections in what is supposed to be a beacon of democracy, a nation that presumes to send international monitors to other countries that are assumed to be incapable of conducting honest and accurate elections.
Resistance to oversight
And yet, touchscreen voting advocates in Florida and elsewhere steadfastly resist adding a mechanism to provide a printed record and printed receipts to voters.
What's the big deal about printing a receipt? Every gasoline pump in the nation is capable of printing a receipt for a credit card purchase. Shouldn't a voting machine be able to rise to the challenge?
Even if it is redundant, big deal. If it provides voters with peace of mind as to the sanctity of their ballot, it's a bargain. If it avoids another debacle such as the 2000 presidential vote count in Florida, it is the bargain of the century.
Florida officials are doing the proponents of electronic balloting no favors. Not only do they lose or misplace data, they are resisting efforts of a coalition of elections groups to conduct an audit during the state's Aug. 31 primary. The groups want the state to audit touchscreen voting machines in 15 counties during the primary election for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Sen. Bob Graham. After voters cast a ballot, they would be randomly asked to cast a test ballot at a separate machine that wouldn't count except for audit purposes.
"You can test machines in the laboratory all you want, but the only way you can know for real if these machines work is to use real, live machines, and have voters cast a test ballot on Election Day," Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.
Not necessary, say state officials. "We have full confidence in the certified equipment that worked flawlessly in the 2002 elections and in hundreds of successful elections around the state since then," said Alia Faraj, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood.
Hood, a Republican, and Gov. Jeb Bush steadfastly maintain that Florida is ready, willing and able to conduct efficient and verifiable elections with the equipment at hand.
Unlikely dissent
Unfortunately, the word hasn't gotten to the Florida Republican Party. The state GOP paid for a flier critical of the new technology and sent it to some south Florida voters urging them to vote by absentee ballot. The flier, which included the unauthorized use of a picture of the governor's brother, President Bush, warned, "The new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount."
It added, "Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today."
It is too late to add printers in Florida or any other state for the 2004 election. The best that can be done now is hope that the election goes off without a hitch.
But no state should order any new equipment that isn't capable of providing a paper record for recount purposes, and existing touchscreen systems should be retrofitted expeditiously.
If the Florida GOP doesn't trust paperless voting, why should anyone else?