Really folks, is there any doubt that Jeb is rigging Florida for his bro, again?

 

From the Austin American-Statesman, Friday, August 6, 2004:

Four years later, new election controversies dog Florida

$130 million fix will result in fair election, state officials say; others aren’t so sure, fearing Florida is on the verge of ‘being the next Florida’

 

By Mike Williams

WASHINGTON BUREAU

Friday, August 6, 2004

COCOA BEACH, Fla. -- After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, Florida’s top politicians and elections officials vowed it would never happen again.

They passed sweeping changes in election laws and poured more than $130 million into purchasing touch-screen voting machines, retraining poll workers and designing voter-education drives.

But with another too-close-to-call presidential contest only three months away, controversy is again swirling in the Sunshine State like a blizzard of paper chads from punch-card ballots.

A state-mandated effort to purge voter lists of felons has been scrapped amid a swirl of charges of incompetence and political favoritism. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has called for a federal investigation.

Meanwhile, concerns deepen about the reliability of the ATM-style touch-screen machines. As a result, more voters than ever in counties that use the machines are expected to forego the new technology and cast absentee ballots in the state’s Aug. 31 primary and Nov. 2 presidential election as a way to create a paper record of their votes.

“I don’t think any state will have a 100 percent problem-free election,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa and a longtime observer of Florida politics. “But if there is a problem in Florida, it gets magnified into one the size of the universe.”

Widespread problems with the Florida tally prompted a five-week drama that ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision resulting in a razor-thin, 537-vote victory for George W. Bush. Florida’s woes with registration lists, absentee ballots, recounts and the infamous “hanging chads” not only made the state the butt of jokes, but also a source of worry for elections officials and scholars.

Four years later, Gov. Jeb Bush -- the president’s brother -- says reforms pushed through the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2001 are transforming Florida into a “model” for how to hold flawless, fair elections. He also says that some of the current criticism ignores the progress in an effort to stir up more controversy.

“Our number one goal is to have integrity in our elections, to have a smooth and fair elections process,” a Bush spokeswoman recently told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “There are people out there who have an agenda, and that agenda includes eroding confidence in Florida’s elections.”

Bush’s press office did not respond to a request for further comment.

Plenty of people don’t agree with Bush’s assessment. They say Florida is on the verge of “being the next Florida,” a reference to the problems of 2000.

“I’m not confident the state has done enough,” said Bobbie Brinegar, president of the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County, which has joined a nonpartisan coalition in calling for an audit of the Aug. 31 primaries to “battle-test” the touch-screen voting machines. “The governor is saying, ‘Trust us,’ and we’re saying that’s not good enough. The stakes are too high.”

Technical glitches

Only 15 of Florida’s 67 counties will be using the touch-screen machines this year; the rest will use optical-scanning machines. Critics say the touch-screen system creates no paper record that could be used for a recount, and press reports say investigations have found the computer screens are less accurate than the optical-scanning devices.

Further eroding confidence in the touch-screen machines, Miami-Dade County elections officials reported July 27 that a computer crash erased almost all the electronic records from the county’s first widespread use of the machines in the September 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Then, three days later, they said they had found the records on a compact disc.

“There are now more questions than before,” said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a voting-rights group. “I certainly wish someone would test the original disc they are now claiming they found and determine when that disc was made, where it came from, whether it’s been tampered with and if anyone’s opened it.”

Problems plagued the Miami-Dade County machines during the 2002 primary, which former Attorney General Janet Reno lost to Bill McBride by 4,794 votes statewide. The machines took much longer than expected to boot up, and dozens of poll workers turned on and shut down the machines incorrectly. The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County.

Elections officials say problems with the machines have been resolved and that poll workers are now better trained. A Miami-Dade official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost or misplaced in the future.

Voters increasingly are being urged by skeptics of touch-screen voting to turn their backs on the new machines and use absentee ballots, in which choices are made with a pen or pencil. An optical-scanning machine is used to read absentee ballots.

The touch-screens “are faith-based voting,” Rodriquez-Taseff said. “There is no assurance votes actually cast are counted.”

Even Florida’s Republican Party recently sent out a flier critical of the new technology to some south Florida voters: “The new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount. Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today.”

The party has since apologized for the flier.

There are worries that if fear of touch-screen voting results in a record use of absentee ballots, any close election in Florida could once again hinge on “voter intent,” which was at the heart of the chaotic recount battle in 2000. The nightmare scenario is that the Florida election will come down to officials mulling over tens of thousands of absentee ballots and trying to decide how to interpret a stray pen mark.

“Anytime you vote on paper, voters make more mistakes than they do on electronic gear,” said Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, a Houston-based organization that works with election officials throughout the nation.

Another worry is that Florida has a history of absentee ballot fraud. Despite warnings about how easy it already was under the old law to commit fraud, legislators peeled back most of the restrictions on absentee voting. Any voter in Florida can now vote absentee.

“I’m very anti-absentee ballot because of fraud and coercion,” said Ted Selker, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. As an example, he cited a 1997 Miami mayoral race in which all 5,200 absentee ballots were thrown out amid evidence of forgery and vote-buying.

The felon list

Florida’s chief elections official is the secretary of state, a job held by Glenda Hood.

Hood, a Republican with close ties to the Bush family, has become a lightning rod for criticism. She replaced Katherine Harris, a Republican who became a central figure in the 2000 controversy (she not only was Florida’s top elections official at the time, but also was co-chairwoman of George W. Bush’s Florida campaign). After a change in Florida law, the secretary of state post became appointive, and Jeb Bush named Hood in 2003 after Harris won a seat in Congress.

The biggest flare-up for Hood has been over the felon list. Florida is one of only seven states that ban felons from voting, although the state allows those who have served their prison terms to apply for reinstatement of their civil rights.

Hood’s office contracted with a private firm to compile the list, which was kept secret under state law until lawsuits by several groups resulted in its public release. Newspaper analyses following the release showed the list of 48,000 suspected felons contained flaws that made African Americans, a traditionally Democratic bloc, much more likely to be excluded from voting, while only tiny numbers of Hispanics, who have generally supported Republican candidates in Florida, were on the list.

A Miami Herald study found that about 2,000 felons who had gotten their right to vote restored were still on the banned list, many of them African American Democrats.

After defending the list for weeks, Hood scrapped it, leaving the task of excluding felons up to each county’s supervisor of elections.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission blasted the list, calling for a Justice Department investigation into whether it was a deliberate attempt to block some voters from casting ballots. In 2000, an undetermined number of legal voters were turned away at the polls because their names inexplicably appeared on a database of felons.

Hood’s spokeswoman said the errors in the list were not deliberate, but instead the result of compiling information from different state agencies, which use different categories for identifying the felons.

Around the state, many remain uneasy about the coming election. “All elections officials have a prayer: ‘Dear God, please let the winners win big,’ “ Lewis said.

A landslide appears unlikely, however. President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry are locked in a virtual dead heat in most opinion polls, prompting concerns that Florida might go through another election-night meltdown.

“It looks like Florida may be a nail-biter again,” MacManus said. “Unfortunately, technological change hardly ever occurs error-free, whether it’s cars or voting machines. But the stakes are much higher with voting machines.”

This article contains material from wire services.