Technology bypasses voters

By CURTIS KRUEGER, RYAN DAVIS and JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 10, 2000

Using a home computer, without touching a piece of paper, you can download a dictionary's worth of information in minutes.

So why is it that when we are doing something as important as electing a president, election workers fan out to remote precincts, load up huge stacks of old-fashioned computer cards and wait until midnight to find out who won?

Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties are among those still using computer card-reader voting systems that decided whether Jimmy Carter should stay in the White House.

Meanwhile, Hernando and Citrus counties have moved into a new era, adopting systems in which voters color in little ovals on paper ballots, similar to SAT tests or a Lotto card, which are read by optical scanners.

"It's just better technology," Citrus Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill said.

As the world watches Florida's vote totals rise and fall like a rolling tide, it's natural to ask whether the technology of punch cards is up to the task of 21st century voting.

Punch cards are used in Palm Beach County, which has been beset with controversy, and also in Pinellas County, where the second recount in two days showed that Gore added 417 votes and Bush lost 61 compared to election night. Punch cards were used in Hillsborough, where three of the 10 card-readers broke down, and workers didn't finish counting and double-checking until 3:10 a.m. Wednesday.

Punch cards are known to have some problems. Each card is filled with tiny rectangles that a voter punches out with a stylus. Those tiny holes translate into your vote after a machine reads the cards.

But sometimes those minuscule scraps -- election workers call them "chads" -- don't pop all the way out. They hang by a thread, and sometimes flap back and forth. If the chad hangs one way, it counts as a vote. If the chad flips back into place, covering the hole, your vote will not be read.

The chad problem means that during recounts, "In all likelihood, you're going to have a fluctuation of vote totals," said Pasco County Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning. "How do you get rid of that? You get rid of punch-cards."

Nonetheless, he and his counterparts in Pinellas and Hillsborough have confidence in their systems.

"It's a fine line I walk," Browning said. "I don't want it reported that the voting system is inaccurate or it doesn't count right. I can't say that; it's not true."

Deborah Clark and Pam Iorio, the supervisors in Pinellas and Hillsborough, respectively, also said they are confident their systems are reliable and accurate, and that they have proved so in many elections.

"I don't feel squirrelly about the system at all," added Pinellas County Commissioner Sallie Parks, a member of the county's Canvassing Board.

Neither does Ernest Hawkins, president of the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks.

"I know every voting system that exists in the United States of America with some degree of intimacy, and I don't see any system out there that's any better," Hawkins said. While the system has its problems, Hawkins said he still considers it to be the most accurate system with the best audit trail.

Pinellas County's recounts turned up a significant difference in votes for Gore and Bush apparently because of human error in the first count. And the world's fanciest technology can't prevent that.

"As long as you've got a human system, it'll have human failings," said Pinellas County Judge and canvassing board member Patrick Caddell.

Consider the cutting-edge technology, in which voters run their fingers over a computer screen to make their choices. If they choose two presidential candidates -- as 19,000 voters did in Palm Beach County -- a warning lets the voter know he or she has made a mistake. But there is no paper record of the vote. So unlike punch cards, you can't do a painstaking recount by hand.

Browning, Clark and Iorio have informally discussed new voting systems that would be faster and possibly more accurate, but are mindful of the millions of dollars it would cost.

"You're asking the county, the taxpayers, to spend a lot of money," Iorio said. She said she would consider going to county commissioners with a proposal in 2001, but not until she had exhaustively researched the matter. Clark said she had no immediate plans to seek approval to buy such a system but that she is constantly looking into new technology.

Citrus and Hernando are happy with their changes, however.

Hernando Elections Supervisor Ann Mau said she selected AccuVote, with its $410,000 price tag, to replace the Datavote punch-card system because the Datavote often required several cards and was time-consuming and cumbersome for Hernando's older voter base, of which 39 percent are 65 or older.

AccuVote faced its challenges early, but voters seem to like it, Mau said, and it works "wonderfully."

With Hernando's system, the results are sent via modem from the precincts directly to the elections office in downtown Brooksville, where the totals are tabulated. Its tallies were complete by 9:30 p.m., compared to past midnight in other elections.

In North Florida's rural Union County, with about 7,000 registered voters, Supervisor of Elections Babs Montpetit thinks she has a very accurate system: Voters fill out a paper ballot by hand. After the polls close, workers count the ballots in stacks. If the numbers don't add up, they count again. It's the last Florida County that still counts ballots by hand.

But even there, it's time for an upgrade. She expects to move to an automated system by 2002.

"We're growing," she said. "We need our results in sooner."

-- Times staff writers Bill Varian, Wayne Washington, Adam C. Smith and Shelby Oppel contributed to this report.

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