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Ensuring a valid election gets harder in Leon County

An elections official with questions about security finds it hard to find a voting machine vendor.

TALLAHASSEE - Elections controversies just seem to stick to Florida.

With the memory of a botched 2000 presidential election still etched in the minds of most elections supervisors in the state, Leon County's Ion Sancho is finding he can't get the equipment he says he needs to guarantee an honest election.

Vendors of the ATM-like electronic voting machines, tired of Sancho's criticisms over the level of security in their software, no longer want to do business with him or the county. All three companies certified to do business in Florida - Diebold Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc. and Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. - have said no.

Sancho's insistence on quality also has angered several Florida officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush, and has already cost his county more than a half-million dollars.

Nonetheless, the feisty official has his share of supporters, with the Tallahassee Democrat dubbing him "a zealous soldier in election reform battles."

"Ion is one of the few to ask the questions," said Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist for Boston firm Security Innovation. "Like, what is this thing actually doing to my vote? How is it processing my vote?"

Thompson said most elections officials use the new equipment blindly. "You need people who understand software and software security to understand what the risks are."

The 2000 vote recount in Florida that settled the presidential election exposed myriad problems in the state and led to widespread voter skepticism across the nation.

More problems surfaced during the 2002 election cycle in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, helping spur Congress to pass a law that led more counties to adopt the high-tech, e-voting equipment.

Nearly a quarter of Americans who voted in 2004 used an electronic ballot, almost doubling the percentage from the 2002 election, according to the political consulting firm Election Data Services.

But a September report from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, pointed to significant security and reliability problems.

A separate review of voting machine logs used in Palm Beach County in the 2002 election revealed thousands of errors, just two years after it was forced to manually recount votes.

Sancho wants to make sure such problems don't occur in Leon County.

"Florida is one example of how partisan politics interfere with having folks' votes being counted accurately," said Sancho, 55. "If you make a system that can be manipulated, unfortunately in our current political environment, it probably will be," Sancho said. "Why take that chance?"

He likes the optical scanners used in his county the past several election cycles, but he believes there ought to be a paper trail. To underscore the system's vulnerabilities, he even had his own system hacked into in December.

And that has ruffled some of his colleagues around the state.

"He kind of has his own drummer," said Susan Gill, the Citrus County elections supervisor who also serves as president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. "He doesn't object to being viewed as someone standing out there by himself."

He recently ran into trouble with his commissioners over the loss of $564,421 in federal grant money because the county missed a Jan. 1 deadline for meeting a federal requirement to provide voting systems for disabled people. Now it's up to the Legislature to decide whether to reinstate the money.

[Last modified March 26, 2006, 00:25:14]