FL: Elections: a failure of trust

Originally published December 12, 2006
It's not the machines but the system that needs fixing

By Mark Lane
THE DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL

http://tinyurl.com/ylxqos

The fight over the U.S. House race in Sarasota shows no sign of abating. And running elections until Christmas seems an established Florida tradition.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called for a re-vote, and the Democratic candidate, Christine Jennings, has filed suit to overturn the election. She has even asked the U.S. House to step in and refuse to seat Republican Vern Buchanan, the winner by 369 votes.

The state, meanwhile, completed an audit of the county's touch-screen voting machines and found nothing unusual.

Still unexplained is why more than 18,000 Sarasota County voters - 14 percent - didn't vote in this race while the undervote was normal in the district's other four counties. In DeSoto County, it was only 1 percent.

The dispute centers on touch-screen voting machines. Was there a bug that caused votes not to register? Or were voters just confused by a ballot layout that made the race easy to overlook?

Both arguments are plausible. Both miss an important point - the problem is less with the machines than with ourselves.

Oh, not you, Florida Voter, although you certainly have a way of bringing these things on yourself. I mean with the way we pick people to count the results. This is less a failure of machinery than a failure of trust.

Two years ago, former President Jimmy Carter said Florida lacked ''some basic international requirements for a fair election.'' First among them was an ''unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.'' He said another disputed election in Florida ''now seems likely.''

The reaction to this was outrage and incomprehension. Imagine, somebody saying that Florida can't hold elections! Crazy talk! Everybody knows the answer is just to buy new machines.

Gov. Jeb Bush said he was ''disappointed'' by the remarks. The secretary of state's office said Carter was ''misinformed.''

But we bought new machines, and Floridians remain skeptical of the results.

Skeptical because of the 2000 Florida recount, the felons' list fiasco and a dozen other decisions by Florida's secretaries of state that have made the state's elections office seem like an arm of the Republican Party. A perception that former Secretaries Katherine Harris and Glenda Hood and current Secretary Sue Cobb have done little to counteract. Even when picking computer experts to see what happened in Sarasota, the office chose a Florida State University professor who is an outspoken Republican activist who took part in pro-Bush demonstrations during the 2000 recount.

On the local level, the Sarasota County supervisor of elections, Kathy Dent, ran for office as a Republican and this year campaigned unsuccessfully against a voter initiative demanding a paper backup on voting machines.

Machinery would matter less if partisan politicians and political participants had less of a role overseeing elections.

It undermines public trust when local supervisors of elections are still elected by party label. And Florida's election system should be headed by a boring, by-the-book bureaucrat who has a job regardless of who's governor. Not a party fundraiser like Cobb. Not a party-affiliated politician like Hood or Harris.

Unless we take the parties out of Florida vote-counting, biannual Florida recounts will continue to be a national joke. Close results won't be accepted as legitimate. And the post-election season will continue to be part of the holiday season.

Mark Lane is a columnist for The Daytona Beach News-Journal. He may be reached at mark.lane@news-jrnl.com.