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Politics

Paper vote trail IS coming

By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published December 16, 2006

A paper trail on touch screen voting machines is coming to Florida one way or another.

It's a matter of time.

Even before the meltdown in Sarasota with 18,000 under-votes in an extremely close race for Congress, Charlie Crist, our next governor, said he liked the idea of giving voters a piece of paper to verify their choices.

His new secretary of state, Pasco County Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning, who is widely regarded as an expert on voting issues, has never seen the need for a paper trail.

But he says he will keep an open mind. "I want to do the best thing for Florida," Browning said.

The problem with a paper trail isn't in the executive branch. It's in the Legislature.

Browning served on the 2001 Elections Reform Task Force that looked for ways to restore faith in Florida elections after the 2000 recount. The report carried a brief but prophetic warning about touch screen voting, buried in a single sentence on Page 34.

"Many DRE touch screen machines produce no paper ballots, making recounts difficult," it said.

(The task force report is online at www.collinscenter.org/initiatives.)

That was six years before Sarasota, where Republican Vern Buchanan edged Democrat Christine Jennings by fewer than 400 votes. She filed a lawsuit seeking a revote in the 13th District.

Another of the bipartisan group's proposals (No. 12) was to replace doomed punch cards with "a uniform and standardized statewide voting system for the 2002 election cycle."

That might have led counties to switch to economical and highly reliable optical scan ballots, on which voters fill in ovals next to their choices.

The Legislature said no, and decided to let each county make its own choice. Most chose optical scan systems. But amid intense lobbying by vendors, 15 counties bought touch screen units. One was Sarasota.

Last year, Democratic state Rep. Ken Gottlieb tried to amend a major elections bill to require a "voter-verified paper record suitable for a manual audit."

Republicans defeated it.

But in that same 2004-06 term, lawmakers passed other election "reforms" that were struck down as unconstitutional. One made it almost impossible for third parties to sign up new voters. The other required 100-foot barriers at polling sites, which a judge said violated the First Amendment because it barred media exit polls.

The reorganized Legislature finds different lawmakers on committees that will propose changes to the election laws.

For example, the vice chairman of the House Ethics & Elections Committee is freshman Rep. Peter Nehr, a Republican from Tarpon Springs.

Nehr says he likes the idea of a "none of the above" ballot option. That, he says, would prove that some undervotes are due to voters' decisions to skip a race.

Where's the public clamor for a paper trail?

An Election Day survey of 800 Florida voters taken for the Collins Center for Public Policy found that 73 percent of voters like the system as it is and just 5 percent wanted a paper trail.

Still, a paper trail is coming to Florida because Democrats now control Congress. HR 550, a bill by Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, has broad support.

That is why Ion Sancho, the maverick elections supervisor from Leon County who supports a paper trail, went to Capitol Hill last week. He met with Holt and congressional staffers to push for the change.

"I'm done messing with the Florida Legislature," said Sancho, who uses optical scan ballots. "Congress is where I'm going to put my effort in."

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

[Last modified December 16, 2006, 01:06:53]