EDITORIAL: Paper trail the next 'dangling chad'

By Joel Engelhardt

Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer

http://tinyurl.com/yhryac

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Sarasota County isn't the only place in Florida with "lost votes."

If you assume that they were cast in the first place, which I don't, Sarasota's 18,382 undervotes in a close congressional race are a blip next to the 40,168 votes that were not cast in Broward County for chief financial officer, the 35,456 votes that were not cast in Miami-Dade County for attorney general, and the 45,672 votes that were not cast in three smaller counties - Lee, Charlotte and Sumter - for attorney general.

In all those cases, votes mysteriously did not count. Whether they were cast remains unknown. Those "lost votes" are not the subject of national debate because those elections were not close. Bill McCollum won the attorney general's post by 250,000 votes. Alex Sink won CFO by 328,000.

The five-county District 13 congressional race, however, was decided by 369 votes. It was so close that Democrat Christine Jennings is contesting her loss to Republican Vern Buchanan. Ms. Jennings thinks that she would have won had those 18,000 voters in Sarasota, a county she carried, counted.

The nation wants to know: Did the machines malfunction? Did voters ignore the congressional race? Did they miss the names of the two candidates for the District 13 House seat atop a page dominated by the 12 candidates for governor and lieutenant governor? If only there had been a paper trail, the national conspiracy theorists proclaim, there would be no question of who won.

Sorry, folks. It's not that simple.

The problem is that a paper trail raises questions of its own. Printers stall or jam. Paper rips. Voters, who are supposed to be checking the printout, often don't look. Poll workers would have to become printer police. If the paper jams, no one notices and the roll is left blank, does that mean that the vote wasn't cast? You bet it does. Didn't dangling chads disqualify punch-card voters?

Even though dangling chads made Florida a laughingstock, Congress is intent on requiring printers. While the lawmakers talk, a commission set up by Congress in the wake of the 2000 election is weighing a less-than-ringing recommendation from its technical advisory committee. Last week, the panel deadlocked 6-6 on the question of requiring printers before accepting a watered-down version: New systems should have them, but existing systems don't have to.

I like to think that they refused to mandate printers because of what happened in Ohio. No, not Ohio in November 2004, when, happily, presidential voting controversies shifted the nation's election conspiracy spotlight from Florida. I'm talking about the Ohio primary in May. That was the state's first election in which printers were required and established as the final word.

A study for Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, by the Election Science Institute found that 10.4 percent of the printers on 375 machines didn't work properly. Hundreds or possibly thousands of votes were not backed up. Printers jammed, but voters kept voting. Blank spots showed up on the paper rolls. Some rolls were held together with tape. Reconciling the electronic count with the paper trail was impossible. It's enough to make the dangling chad look good.

Throw out the millions spent on electronic voting, critics say, and bring on fill-in-the-bubble optical-scan ballots. Aside from hysteria, where's the proof that electronic voting doesn't work? The machines in Sarasota were tested by "voters" spending a day punching in votes according to a script. The machines performed perfectly. No errors occurred in the count. That's worth repeating: They didn't miss a single vote. Palm Beach County performed the same test after both its September primary and its November election and got the same results. No errors. Flawless.

But touch screens can't be trusted, critics contend. They might be manipulated. There's a county in Ohio where they made a mistake. Or was it California? Only a paper trail can tell.

Ohio shows that paper trails aren't a cure-all. In fact, printers are so prone to problems that they could be good for Florida. Once officials start sorting through miles of printouts to decide a disputed national election, Florida 2000 finally will be forgotten.