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Florida Elections
Plastic - and Paper?
New electronic voting machines aren't perfect, and some people around Florida haven't given up on requiring a paper trail as part of the voting process.
No chads
In the wake of the 2000 presidential balloting and the hanging-chad controversy that clouded the Florida results, the Florida Legislature responded with a law that put Florida ahead of the curve in voting system reform. The 2001 law decertified punch-card machines and required each county to replace its equipment with touch-screen devices or optical scanners.
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Today, 15 counties, more than 50% of the voting public in Florida, use touch-screen systems, also called DREs. The other 52 counties switched to optical scanners, a less-expensive option -- but one that the Select Task Force on Election Procedures appointed by Bush said in 2001 was preferable, at least until kinks in the touch-screen systems had been worked out.
While optical scanners can detect "overvotes," the selection of more than one candidate, touch-screen machines eliminate the possibility of overvotes entirely. DREs also minimize the potential for "undervotes" by prompting voters on a review screen and showing them what questions or ballots they might have skipped. Dawn Roberts, director of Florida's Division of Elections, notes a "dramatic" drop in the percentage of overvotes and undervotes from 2.9% of all ballots in 2000 to 0.4% of the ballots cast in 2004.
Unlike optical scanners, which use paper ballots, touch-screen systems produce no independent record of a voter's intent. Instead, the touch screens provide three internal verifications of the vote count -- once through the machine's internal memory, again on a removable cartridge and finally on a paper tape that prints within the machine.
