[Mb-civic] Integrity of Florida Virtual Vote in Doubt

[Michael Butler]

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    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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