FORT LAUDERDALE - Touch screen voting machines are "inherently incapable" of manual recounts and at present cannot comply with state law requiring recounts in tight races, U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler testified Monday in his lawsuit seeking some kind of paper trail for more than half of Florida's voters.
Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood on Friday issued a new recount rule for 15 counties with touch screen machines to replace an old one struck down by a state judge in August. But Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, said: "She cannot do what the machines cannot do. The machines cannot conduct a manual recount."
A witness for Wexler, Stanford computer science professor David Dill, offered an assortment of scenarios for touch screen trouble, from writing the software through the actual voting and tallying.
Touch screen recount provisions amount to printing a duplicate copy of vote records from machines and counting them by hand, a process that should produce a different result only in case of "serious error or serious tampering," Dill testified on the first day of trial.
If the Nov. 2 presidential election results are as tight as the 537-vote final margin in 2000, Wexler said, "I don't think this rule is going to satisfy either candidate."
Wexler wants U.S. District Judge James Cohn to quickly impose some short-term fixes for voting in two weeks and long-term remedies as well.
"We have a rule in effect that is specific to touch screen equipment. That is all that is required," Assistant Attorney General George Waas told the judge. "This court is being asked to go where no court has gone before."
Ron Labasky, attorney for county elections supervisors, insisted outside court that Hood's rule meets the recount requirement. He said skeptics will never be convinced, but, "You just have to trust the technology."
Florida threw out punch card voting systems after its prolonged 2000 recount dispute became the nationwide butt of jokes. But touch screen elections have produced undervotes, or votes that aren't counted, at five to six times the rate seen with optical scans, the only other system used in Florida.
Dill would prefer to see the touch screen counties (which include Pasco, Pinellas and Hillsborough) switch to optical scan systems because election officials have not certified any system for producing paper records to back up touch screen votes. Touch screen counties already give absentee voters the fill-in-the-bubble ballots read by optical scanners.
"If there's a better solution that comes in five or 10 years, we won't have run out of money," Dill said.
Testimony was expected to stretch into Wednesday. The judge hasn't said when he might rule.
