The Florida secretary of state approves a hand recount of touch screen machines in the case of a close election.
By JONI JAMES
Published October 16, 2004
TALLAHASSEE - For months, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood insisted manual recounts were not needed on touch screen voting machines. But on Friday, Hood complied with a judge's order and issued an emergency rule to doublecheck a close vote.
Should a manual recount be required after the Nov. 2 election, counties would be ordered to print a copy of each voter's ballot as stored in the touch screen machines' memory.
Election officials would then compare the undervotes - the term used when a voter opts not to cast a vote in a particular race - on the "ballot images" to the tallies calculated by the machines.
Any discrepancies remaining after three comparisons of the numbers would be turned over to the county canvassing board to resolve. State law requires manual recounts when candidates' vote totals, after one automatic recount, are within one-quarter of 1 percent of each other.
But critics, including U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, say Hood's plan still falls far short of what should be required to ensure each vote in Florida is counted. His lawsuit against Hood over the issue begins Monday in a federal court in Fort Lauderdale.
Touch screen machines are used in just 15 of Florida's 67 counties, but roughly half of all Florida voters will see them on Election Day since they are used by nearly all of the state's most populous counties, including Hillsborough and Pinellas.
"They are still playing games with words to try to get by," said West Palm Beach attorney Jeffrey Liggio, who is representing Wexler in Monday's case. "You don't have any way of telling with the way these machines are configured whether an undervote is a situation where a voter intended not to vote or if it was a mistake by the machine."
Liggio's contention: If a touch-screen machine is corrupted, there's no way of knowing if the "ballot image" is actually the correct record of the voter's intent or just a botched file.
Wexler, along with labor unions and civil rights groups, have asked the courts to require the state to mandate that touch screen machines include a paper trail, verified by a voter at the precinct, that can be used for recount purposes.
But Hood, along with her boss Gov. Jeb Bush, have rejected such suggestions. There is no provision in state law for such a requirement, and they say they have full confidence that the touch screen machines, which contain three distinct memory chips, are accurate.
"We crafted a rule that is in line with what the law permits," said Jenny Nash, Hood's press secretary.
An administrative judge ordered Hood to issue the emergency order on a manual recount seven weeks ago after determining she erred when she said manual recounts were unnecessary on touch screen machines. The judge's ruling stemmed from a complaint filed by labor unions and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Hood's emergency rule is similar to procedures followed by Broward County, where a close special legislative election in January prompted county election officials to print out "ballot images" and count them by hand.
