t r u t h o u t - Integrity of Florida Virtual Vote in Doubt

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Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:20:51 -0400

Subject:t r u t h o u t - Integrity of Florida Virtual Vote in Doubt

 

 

 

t r u t h o u t - Integrity of Florida Virtual Vote in Doubt

 

Address:http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102404W.shtml

 

Integrity of Florida Virtual Vote in Doubt

By Rachel Konrad

The Associated Press

Friday 22 October 2004

 

Delray Beach, Fla. -

 

Edward Bitet fought in World War II, built affordable housing for

veterans and taught sixth grade. When the Long Island native retired to

Florida, he fulfilled another civic duty by becoming a poll worker. But

Bitet, 77, isn't volunteering this year †" he says he doesn't trust

Palm Beach County's electronic voting machines.

He walked out of a county demonstration of touch-screen terminals

convinced that software bugs could wreak havoc on Nov. 2.

 

" We lost an election four years ago because they fooled around with

the paper ballots and couldn't recount them, " said Bitet, a Democrat.

" Now we're moving to a system without paper, and they won't even have

the ballots to recount. I can't be a part of this. "

 

With polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters

for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the election's outcome may again

hinge on a Florida recount.

And the more that Floridians learn about how voting machines

work, the more they question whether the 15 counties with paperless

voting systems can accurately count and recount votes.

 

Problems in those counties †" home to just over half

the registered voters in the crucial swing state †" could delay the

results for days or weeks, and even force the courts to step in again

and choose the next president.

 

Given Florida's botched election in 2000, when the Supreme

Court halted a recount after 36 days and handed a 537-vote victory to

Bush, political tension is palpable in the Sunshine State. Election

officials are hoping for a landslide so big that even thousands of

deleted or misrecorded ballots won't change the outcome.

But if this proves to be another ultra-close vote, many

critics of electronic balloting †" including the many Democrats who

believe the 2000 election was stolen †" say they'll take to the

streets.

" I was angry last time. This time it'd be quadruple the

anger, " said Francois Jean, 27, whose ramshackle ranch house in Miami's

Little Haiti neighborhood is festooned with Kerry placards. " The system

we were supposed to believe in failed us †" like we didn't even

vote, like we were aliens from outer space who didn't count. "

David Niven, a political science professor at Florida

Atlantic University, expects massive demonstrations if exit polling is

close and lawsuits and technical problems overshadow a clear victory.

" I don't know if there will be rioting in the streets with

pitch forks and torches †" after all, many of these people are 75

years old, " Niven said. " But it's fair to say that their level of anger

will grow exponentially from four years ago. "

This time, the outrage wouldn't be over dimpled, pregnant

and hanging chads; the state banned the maligned punch cards after 2000.

Instead, it would almost certainly be directed at those who decided on

the touch-screen machines.

Computer scientists, practically as a profession, don't

trust them †" not without a range of safeguards that aren't in

place for this election. They say the touch screens now in use could

alter or delete votes †" and that without paper copies, voters will

never know if their votes counted.

Add Florida's bitter partisan politics to the stew of voting

technology uncertainty and the worries that loom largest aren't about

software bugs or hardware glitches but rather the potential for

electoral shenanigans.

It's no surprise, then, that black voters in the state are

among the most distrustful of e-voting. They've experienced a

disproportionate number of problems in elections †" from felon

voter purges that included non-convicts to early voting polling stations

set up miles away from the nearest black neighborhood.

" The Republican Party has tried to disenfranchise us, " said

Addie Greene, a black Democratic commissioner for Palm Beach County.

Greene helped the county purchase 5,000 Sequoia voting machines †"

then became an active opponent of paperless voting and is asking

constituents to send in absentee ballots.

" Palm Beach County will create a stir nationwide that no one

ever would believe ... if we're disenfranchised again, " she said.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's top elections

official, and other top Republicans accuse those who challenge the

touch-screen machines' reliability of irrationally eroding Americans'

faith in democracy. They insist that touch screens are as reliable as

paper ballots, with Gov. Jeb Bush maintaining that e-voting critics have

bought into " conspiracy theories " and lost their common sense.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy

groups, meanwhile, have sued the state, arguing for better recount

guidelines.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, sued and

demanded that all counties produce paper records.

In testimony this past week in Fort Lauderdale, the attorney

for county elections chiefs said Wexler was playing politics, trying to

" squeeze one more vote out " and " regress " to the confusing recounts of

the 2000 election.

Florida law requires a manual recount in any race with a

victory margin of one-quarter of 1 percent or less. In April, Hood

issued an order prohibiting manual recounts on touch screens. The rule

was struck down after the ACLU suit. On Oct. 15, exasperated officials

issued new guidelines for recounting virtual votes.

The rules require election administrators to install updated

software that can search electronic ballot records and tally the number

of ballots in which not every race was voted on.

County election supervisors must print out †" like a

cash register tally of a day's sales †" a detailed record of all

incomplete ballots to see if they match the number of incomplete ballots

the computer said existed when polls closed.

If the numbers don't match, supervisors will recount up to

two more times.

It's unclear what would happen if thousands of votes went

missing, but election officials insist the safeguards are adequate

†" for the initial counts and for recounts.

" These systems go through rigorous tests, and before each

and every election they are checked again, " said Hood spokeswoman Alia

Faraj. " When the tests are completed, they're sealed and secured, and

the seal is only broken on election day. The systems are working the way

they're supposed to. "

But computer scientists say bugs or hardware failures could

alter or erase votes, causing the machines to record bogus data even

before a voter touches the screen.

" We have a saying in computer science: Garbage in, garbage

out, " said Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist and

expert on electronic voting. " If you have a machine with a bug or

glitch, printing out the incorrect votes is an exercise in futility and

an absolute waste of time. "

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