State: Disabled seek greater voice in new voting method

TALLAHASSEE -- Being born blind didn't stop James Kracht from going to law school. But it has discouraged the 50-year-old Miami lawyer from carrying out a cherished civic duty: voting.

Kracht took Tuesday off from his job as an assistant Miami-Dade county attorney and joined others with disabilities at the Capitol. They urged Secretary of State Katherine Harris to use her rulemaking authority to require that new systems must be accessible to all voters, including those who can't see or hear or walk.

The Florida Council of the Blind estimates more than 250,000 of Florida's 9-million voters are visually impaired, and hundreds of thousands more have physical disabilities. Hundreds of Florida voting precincts are in churches, which are exempt from the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

As Florida overhauls its election machinery because of the problems exposed by the November election, advocates for the disabled say the state should seize the moment before it slips away.

"I want to be sure that every Floridian has the right to independently cast a secret ballot," Kracht testified. "This fundamental, basic civil right must finally become a reality so that all Floridians are able to cast ballots privately and independently in a verifiable manner."

Like others who testified Tuesday, Kracht, a member of the Council of the Blind, urged the state to quickly certify touch-screen voting machines and to encourage voting by phone.

Kracht said he went to the polls last November and tried to vote without help. "I've never been so humiliated and embarrassed and had such a horrible experience in 50 years of living," he said.

Kracht said the state should demand machines that let people with disabilities cast ballots without help from others, unless they ask for it.

The 90-minute meeting was an arcane procedure known as a rule development workshop. Laws written by legislators do not cover everything, so lawmakers delegate many details to state agencies that are required to solicit public comment before enacting new rules.

Voting systems now in use in Florida are not required to be accessible to the disabled, and people with disabilities say that with the focus on overvoted and undervoted punch card ballots, they were given short shrift by the bipartisan elections task force that held hearings around the state earlier this year.

Doug Towne of St. Petersburg, vice president of the Florida Coalition on Disability Rights, said he fears counties will do nothing to help people with disabilities unless the state demands it -- and puts up some of the money.

Cost is a big factor. Harris opened the workshop by saying Florida should "lead the way" in improving accessibility to voting. She formed a task force to study the issue.

The panel, led by Republican Rep. Larry Crow of Palm Harbor, is getting organized at a time when counties must decide how much to spend on new voting equipment before the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year.

Robert Miller, president of the Florida Council of the Blind, told Harris' elections experts to forget the optical scan systems favored by many counties, because they are not user-friendly for people with disabilities.

"We need to rule out what will not work," said Miller, who touted touch screens or telephone voting instead.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho, a leading advocate of optical scanners at each precinct, said he too is frustrated by the fact that no system certified in Florida is fully accessible to all. "This state has taken elections for granted for far too long," Sancho said. "Elections must be a priority."

- Times researcher Deirdre Morrow contributed to this report.

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