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Florida Elections
Prophet Without Honor?
Leon County's test of its electronic voting machines angered the manufacturer and state officials - then California did a similar test.
Currently, 28 states have voterverified paper record requirements, and 13 require mandatory manual audits of those voter-verified paper records. Without a separate method of vote counting that can be double-checked, Florida's audit of the March elections in Pinellas was meaningless, says Haengel. "They keep asking, 'where's your evidence?' If votes are flipped, there will be no way for us to know that. There is a gap here. That's why independent voter verification of a ballot is so important."
In Sarasota County, voters are spearheading an effort to require a voter-verified paper trail. If their initiative passes, "we would be the only county in Florida that would have this requirement defined in our charter," says Kindra Muntz, chairwoman of the Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections.
Miami-Dade County, meanwhile, may replace touch-screen machines with optical scanners in part because of the touch screens' high operating costs. Originally purchased for $24.5 million, that county's iVotronic machines required another $6.6 million to operate in the 2004 elections. Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola noted in a 2005 report that "a number" of citizens had expressed a desire for a tangible, auditable paper record of votes. Optical scan systems provide that paper trail, even in the case of a complete electronic failure. With touch-screen systems, he said, the "coding, casting of ballots and tabulation" are all "inextricably intertwined."
The mechanics of creating a voter-verified paper ballot are more complicated than they may appear, opponents counter. Retrofitting touch-screen systems with printers is an expensive option riddled with what-ifs. What happens, for instance, if the printers fail or jam? Who's to say that paper ballots themselves can't be tampered with? Suppose a hand count of paper ballots disagrees with an electronic tally -- which would be considered the official vote count?
