Yesterday, Florida governor Charlie Crist signed a bill prohibiting paperless voting . We Floridians cranked up Jimmy Buffett songs and raised margarita glasses to Crist--as should all of America's voters, given that Florida has 27 Electoral College votes (the fourth highest number behind California, New York, and Texas).
After Election 2000, state officials crammed paperless touch screen voting machines down our throats and continued publicly extolling the virtues of paperless voting despite glaring evidence to the contrary. For example, . . .
just before Election 2004, then-Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood publicly claimed that Florida's paperless machines had "worked flawlessly" during the 2002 elections. This claim astonished most newspaper-reading Floridians. As the state's Chief Election Officer, Hood was in the position to know about the massively flawed performance of touch-screen machines in 2002.
For example, re: the November 2002 gubernatorial election, Broward County reported software glitches that "caused a failure to report 100,000 votes." And Florida's September 2002 Democratic primary was riddled with voting machine problems. Some precincts opened hours late because poll workers couldn't crank up the stubborn machines. Many voters left without voting. Then-governor Jeb Bush ordered precincts to stay open for two extra hours, but not all of them did, so even more voters couldn't vote.
In March 2002, touchscreen machines gave victory to the wrong candidate in a Medley, Florida city election. That same month in Palm Beach County, voters reported that when they touched one candidate's name on the screen, an "X" showed up next to the other candidate's name. Respectful of readers' blood pressure levels, I'll stop listing examples.
Before Election 2004, a South Florida Sun Sentinel analysis found that Florida's touch-screen counties were 8 times more likely to have errors than counties using bubble-in ballots during the March 2004 primaries. The Miami-Dade Election Reform Commission asked Governor Bush and Secretary Hood to order an independent audit of touchscreen machines to ensure that they would work during the presidential election. Bush and Hood said No.
The big question on Floridians' minds: why did officials saddle us with anemic voting machines that didn't produce paper trails? It all started with Florida's Election 2000 embarrassment, to which then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris responded by lobbying the legislature and the public to support paperless voting. The rest is history.
Incidentally, the money-trail is worth a look. For example, Former Florida Secretary of State Sandra Mortham (Harris' predecessor) came out of the attic and took work lobbying for both the Florida Association of Counties and Election Systems & Software, a touchscreen maker. According to the St. Pete Times, "Mortham received a commission from ES&S for every county that bought its touch screen machines," but she wouldn't disclose the amounts. The Florida Association of Counties also got a cut, totaling about $300,000.
Fortunately, Governor Crist is cleaning up the mess that our old crop of officials created. I hope that Florida's touch-screen counties will demand refunds from touch screen makers for selling products that weren't fit to perform their basic tasks.
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