UK Independent on Florida E-Voting

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Seth Johnson <seth.johnson () RealMeasures dyndns org>
Date: September 29, 2004 5:13:42 PM EDTt
Subject: UK Independent on Florida E-Voting


> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=566688


Something rotten in the state of Florida

By andrew Gumbel
29 September 2004


Pregnant chads, vanishing voters... the election fiasco of 2000
made the Sunshine State a laughing stock. More importantly, it
put George Bush in the White House. You'd think they'd want to
get it right this time. But no, as Andrew Gumbel discovers, the
democratic process is more flawed than ever


Of the many weird and unsettling developments in Florida since
the presidential election meltdown four years ago, none is so
startling as the fact that Theresa LePore, the calamitously
incompetent elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, still has
her job. It was LePore who chose the notorious "butterfly ballot"
- a format so confusing that it led thousands of Democrats, many
of them elderly, retired Jewish people, to punch the wrong hole,
giving their vote not to Al Gore, as they had intended, but to
the right-wing, explicitly anti-Jewish fringe candidate Pat
Buchanan.

It was LePore, too, who caused huge problems for the fraught
re-count process, first by insisting on the strictest standards
for determining voter intent and then, with the final deadline 72
hours away, ordering her staff to take the day off for
Thanksgiving. As a result, Palm Beach County fell short of
completing its manual re-count on time, and the whole process -
which even under LePore's strictures had turned up an extra 180
votes for Gore - was rendered void.

Arguably, no one person did more to foul up the maddeningly close
election in Florida in 2000, and no individual bears more
responsibility for the fact that George Bush ended up President
instead of Gore. (Without the butterfly ballot, Gore would have
taken as many as 7,000 more votes and cruised past Bush's
official 537-vote margin of victory.) Yet Theresa LePore will
still be in charge for this November's presidential election -
and things have got considerably worse in the interim.

Palm Beach isn't the only place in Florida where crazy things
have happened. Officials up and down the state have behaved like
drunks caught out on one bender too many. They have talked the
talk of reform quite convincingly, and even lavished considerable
expense on covering up their past lapses. But the bottom line is
that the voting machines still don't work, political corruption
and underhand campaign tactics remain rampant, and too many black
and lower-income voters face daunting, often insurmountable
obstacles in exercising their voting rights.

In a state that promises to be every bit as pivotal as it was
last time, this is deeply worrying. And Palm Beach County shows
why. After the 2000 débâcle, an unrepentant Theresa LePore was
told by the state of Florida that she and her fellow election
supervisors would have to replace the punchcard machines that had
exposed the state to such ridicule. She flew to California, where
she was quickly seduced by an electronic touchscreen voting
system used in Riverside County, just east of Los Angeles.

She was told that Riverside's system had performed flawlessly in
November 2000, even as she and her canvassing board had been hung
up for weeks examining punchcards for dimpled, hanging or
pregnant chads. But Riverside's tabulation system had in fact
suffered meltdown on election night, creating the first of many
controversies about the reliability and accuracy of its Sequoia
Pacific machines.

Blissfully unaware of this, LePore spent $14.4m (£8m) on her own
Sequoia system and unveiled it for local elections in March 2002.
It seems to have fallen at the first hurdle. A former mayor of
Boca Raton, Emil Danciu, was flabbergasted to finish third in a
race for a seat on Boca Raton city council. A poll shortly before
the election had put him 17 points ahead of his nearest rival.

Supporters told his campaign office that when they tried to touch
the screen to light up his name, the machine registered the name
of an opponent. Danciu also found that 15 cartridges containing
the vote totals from machines in his home precinct had
disappeared on election night, delaying the result. It transpired
that an election worker had taken them home, in violation of the
most basicprocedures. Danciu's lawyer, his daughter Charlotte,
said some cartridges were then found to be empty, for reasons
that have never been adequately explained.

Danciu sued for access to the Sequoia source code to see if it
was flawed. He was told that the source code was considered a
trade secret under Florida law, and that even LePore and her
staff were not authorised to examine it, on pain of criminal
prosecution. His suit was thrown out.

Two weeks later, something even stranger happened. In the town of
Wellington, a run-off election for mayor was decided by just four
votes - but 78 votes did not register on the machines at all.
This meant - assuming for a moment that the machines were not
lying - that 78 people had driven to the polls, not voted, and
gone home again.

The scenario beggared belief, but it was touted, with a straight
face, by LePore. Then and since, she has refused to acknowledge
even the slightest flaw in the voting machines, and has resisted
with all her might a growing clamour for a voter-verifiable paper
trail as a back-up. "She's defended the system almost to the
point where it's been ridiculous," Charlotte Danciu said. "She
treated us as though we were sore losers, andas though we were
imbeciles. The tenor of what she told us was that if people were
too dumb to vote on electronic machines, they shouldn't be
voting."

More phantom non-voters showed up in an election in Palm Beach
County in January. Again, those supposedly present but not voting
(137 people) greatly exceeded the margin of victory (12 votes).
That persuaded a local Democrat Congressman, Robert Wexler, to
sue LePore and the state of Florida to force them to adopt a
paper trail. The case is pending.

Wexler went further, sponsoring a professor, Arthur Anderson, to
challenge LePore for her job, putting up $90,000 of his own
campaign money. The election got very strange, not least because
it took on heavily partisan overtones. LePore, a registered
Independent, was championed by the Republican Party as a
much-maligned asset to Floridian democracy (a coded way of
thanking her for her role in sending George Bush to the White
House). Anderson had prominent Democrats stumping for him.

Any pretence of objective fairness was lost as each side accused
the other of promoting a candidate intent on putting party before
the electoral process. It was certainly odd that LePore was
organising an election in which she was a prominent candidate. It
was odder still when, on the August polling day, sheriff's
deputies arrived at the supervisor's office and surrounded the
building with squad cars and "do not cross" barriers. Such police
presence at election sites is technically illegal.

The sheriff's department cited a possible terrorist threat and,
according to a TV station, drew a parallel with the Madrid train
bombings. The source of this threat was never identified, and the
cordoning off of the supervisor's office - which was doubling as
a polling station and collection point for hand-delivered
absentee ballots - looked even more suspicious because a
contentious sheriff's race was also conducted that day.

Sarah "Echo" Steiner, a member of the Palm Beach Coalition for
Election Reform, said the place looked "like a crime scene" when
she dropped off her absentee ballot. It took her a while to find
the lone unmarked entrance at the back where the public could
still go in, and she was worried that the police presence was a
ploy to try to suppress Anderson's absentee vote count (which,
given his supporters' mistrust of the electronic machines, was
expected to be high).

LePore's handling of the absentee ballots was controversial from
start to finish. Her design for the ballot required voters to
fill in a broken arrow linking the name of the office to the
candidate - a system widely expected to cause mayhem, which it
duly did. She also took the unusual step of having the voter's
party affiliation printed on the return envelope, opening the
door for mischief by a corrupt poll-worker or mail-carrier. No
other county does this.

Anderson won the election, but only just - by 51 per cent to 49.
Election reformers were relieved, but suspicious. "We're talking
about one of the most hated politicians in the country, and she
almost wins?" said an incredulous Susan Van Houten, who chairs
the voting reform coalition. "Those numbers: I just don't trust
them any more."

But Palm Beach County will have to trust Theresa LePore in the
presidential election, as she does not leave office until
January. She believes she has been victimised and refuses to
acknowledge any serious wrongdoing, much less apologise. "It's
just amazing that you can do everything right for 30-plus years,
and you have one, albeit not small, incident [the 2000 butterfly
ballot], and you're crucified for it for ever," she said.

Arthur Anderson, who has yet to hear from LePore despite sending
her flowers after the election, said: "She is just not
recognising the level of mistrust among the voters. Much of it
was entirely avoidable."

The 2000 election in Florida represented a huge conflict of
interest, as the state Governor, Jeb Bush, was the brother of the
Republican presidential nominee, and the person in charge of
conducting the election, the Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris, was doubling as George Bush's campaign co-chair. The
conflict has persisted, in one form or another, over the past
four years. The Republican Party finds itself in an unusual
position in Florida: although voter registration slightly favours
the Democrats, the Republicans have managed to engineer the
demographics - through the gerrymandering of electoral districts
- so that they have a lock on both houses of the state
legislature and the Governor's office. They control almost all
the machinery of government, including, in large part, the
management of elections.

While they may have paid lip service to electoral reform after
the 2000 fiasco, clearly their party interest lay in continuing
to suppress Democratic votes while maximising the access of their
own supporters. The Republicans did all they could to avoid
manual re-counts in 2000 because they assumed that the more votes
were re-counted in south Florida, the more they would favour Al
Gore.

The same principle applies now. The Republicans can only be
thrilled that those southern counties have opted for electronic
voting machines, without an independent paper trail, because they
make meaningful re-counts essentially impossible. There have even
been efforts - by the Florida legislature, and by the new
Secretary of State, Glenda Hood - to make re-counts on electronic
machines illegal. Only the intervention of the courts, relying on
a Florida statute calling for the possibility of manual
re-counts, has forestalled them - so far.

The Republican lock on power helps to explain why Florida ignored
the key recommendations of a task force on electoral reform set
up by Governor Bush after the 2000 election. The group urged the
Secretary of State's office to certify a uniform voting system
for all 67 counties. It also concluded that optically scanned
paper ballots were the most secure, accurate system available:
electronic voting was promising, but was not yet ready for prime
time.

That was when a living, breathing conflict of interest came along
in the shape of Sandra Mortham, a Republican former Secretary of
State now working as a lobbyist for Election Systems & Software,
makers of the notorious chad-producing Votomatic punchcard
machines. ES&S was developing an electronic touchscreen machine
called the iVotronic, and was very keen to sell it while memories
of the 2000 election were fresh. Mortham had all the right
contacts, not only because of her previous job but because she
was also a lobbyist for the Florida Association of Counties.

The upshot? The iVotronic was sold to 12 of the state's largest
counties, including Miami-Dade and its immediate northern
neighbour Broward. ES&S paid a percentage of its profits to the
FAC, as well as a commission fee to Mortham. (Most of Florida's
mainly Republican rural counties went with a much cheaper optical
scan system, as the task force recommended.)

The county elections supervisors who went for the iVotronic -
many of them Democrats - fell in love with the idea of dispensing
with paper ballots and leaving all the work of vote-counting to a
computer. The lack of a paper trail struck many of them as a
blessing, not a setback, as they regarded re-counts as an irksome
addition to their workload and a slight to their professionalism.

Unfortunately, the officials never asked the hard questions about
the systems they were buying, with calamitous results. ES&S had
promised Miami-Dade it could add a third language, Creole, to its
touchscreen software (built for English and Spanish), but omitted
to mention that the trilingual package would be loaded via a
dedicated flashcard, and would drastically slow down each
machine. When the iVotronics debuted in September 2002, they took
so long to boot up that the entire Miami-Dade electoral machinery
ground to a halt.

To make matters worse, freak storms knocked out power to certain
polling stations for so long that the battery back-ups on many
iVotronics ran out. The tabulation machines then went bananas.
One Miami precinct reported a 900 per cent turnout; another
showed just one ballot cast out of 1,637 registered voters. "It
turned out that the county had purchased a prototype," said Lida
Rodriguez-Taseff, who heads the Miami-Dade Electoral Reform
Coalition. "This was an invention that had never been tested. We
were the guinea pigs."

For the next election, that November, officials decided to turn
on the machines the night before. Because of the obvious security
risks, the city had police patrols roaming the streets and
guarding precincts all night, at huge cost. There wasn't much
choice: as the Center for Democracy, a non-partisan group
monitoring the election, discovered, it took as long as 70
minutes to fire up each machine, and the system was set up so
that they had to be turned on one after the other, in sequence.
Most polling stations took up to five hours to get ready.

And that is how Miami-Dade will operate in November. ES&S updated
its software, but failed to reduce the boot-up time by much. "The
emergency procedure has become the norm," Rodriguez-Taseff said.
Apart from the security risk of leaving the machines on all
night, it turns out that a software quirk makes it impossible to
detect whether they have been tampered with.

That's not all: when the head of the county technology department
tested the internal audit trail in the computers (the mechanism
that electronic voting advocates say provides sufficient back-up
for a re-count), he found key data scrambled, creating
discrepancies in the secondary vote totals. "I believe there is a
serious 'bug' in the programs that generate these reports, making
the reports unusable," the technician, Orlando Suarez, wrote to
the county elections supervisor in June 2003.

Several state officials, who have continued to trumpet the
virtues of the ES&S machines, denied knowledge of Suarez's letter
until this summer, at which point one of them, the head of the
state division of elections, abruptly resigned. Members of the
Miami-Dade coalition believe that one reason Glenda Hood wants to
outlaw manual re-counts on electronic voting machines is because
she knows they are impossible to do on the ES&S machines, but
would rather not say so up front.

Glenda Hood has become a particular object of attack in the
campaign to hold Florida accountable for its voting practices.
Unlike her predecessor, Katherine Harris, who was at least
nominally independent because she was elected to the post of
Secretary of State, Hood is a direct gubernatorial appointment.
In the words of Congressman Wexler, a particularly ardent critic:
"She is the political mouthpiece of Jeb Bush, a true partisan
using her office to the best possible advantage of the Republican
Party. She is the mechanism Jeb and George Bush have employed to
do everything in their power to make Florida a Bush state."

When a Florida court ruled that Ralph Nader - seen as a possible
spoiler for John Kerry's chances in the Sunshine State - was not
entitled to a place on the ballot, Hood wrote to the 67 elections
supervisors and instructed them to include him anyway. (She was
subsequently vindicated by the Florida Supreme Court.)

More egregiously - certainly in terms of protecting voting rights
- Hood tried earlier in the year to revive a statewide purge list
of suspected felons and ex-felons, ostensibly to clean up
outdated voter rolls. The list, first dreamt up by Sandra Mortham
when she was Secretary of State, disproportionately affects black
voters, who vote Democrat by a nine-to-one margin. The list was
discredited after 2000 because it was found to be riddled with
errors, leading to unknown thousands of cases of wrongful
disenfranchisement, many of which have not been corrected.

The state fought to keep this year's list secret, only to have it
forced into the open by court order. Sure enough, the list -
prepared by the consultancy firm Accenture, which has contributed
$25,000 to Republican candidates in Florida - turned out to be
top-heavy with black voters (including about 2,000 people who had
had their voting rights restored), and it included several people
who could demonstrate that they had no criminal record at all.
Most startlingly, the list of 48,000 included only 61 Hispanic
names - way out of line with the strength of both the general
Hispanic population and the prison population of Hispanic people.
It's probably no coincidence that Hispanics in Florida -
especially Cuban exiles - tend to vote Republican.

Hood was sufficiently embarrassed to drop the list, but the
furore focused attention on another glaring injustice in Florida
politics: the fact that prisoners have no automatic restoration
of voting rights once they have served their time. Florida is one
of just seven states that disenfranchise ex-felons in this way,
and it is by far the largest. The American Civil Liberties Union
estimates that about 600,000 people in Florida are denied their
voting rights because of their criminal history, including one in
three black men.

Former felons can apply for restoration of their voting rights by
executive clemency, but the process is tortuously long, requires
them to waive the privacy of their medical and financial
histories, and has no guaranteed outcome. Governor Bush himself
hears a few dozen cases in hearings held four times a year. Given
the political benefit of keeping most of these ex-felons off the
rolls, it's no surprise that he takes his sweet time. The backlog
of applicants is tens of thousands.

Florida has had felon disenfranchisement laws on its books since
1868, when slavery had just been abolished and the white elite,
humiliated by the Civil War, was looking for other means to deny
blacks their rights. It is hard, even now, not to see a
deliber-ately discriminatory pattern in the law. As Courtenay
Strickland of the ACLU Voting Rights Project put it: "Florida is
creating degrees of citizenship. When you start doing that,
you're creating something that begins to look not quite like a
democracy."

That sentiment resonates in Miami's Little Haiti, home to roughly
half the one million Haitians in the United States. Pro-John
Kerry voting-rights groups have been working the area in force
ahead of the 4 October registration deadline, but they have found
a population almost completely disillusioned with the electoral
process. "They have got it in their minds that Bush will steal
the election again," said Rosa Assinthe, a Haitian-American who
has been on a registration drive for the Service Employees
International Union since April.

Organisers are finding that at least 20 per cent of people who
register to vote through their local Department of Motor Vehicles
(the agency that issues driving licences) are not receiving voter
cards in the mail. People can still vote without a voter card,
but only at the correct polling station. The only sure way of
finding out which station to go to - and they change from
election to election, as do the addresses of lower-income voters
and recent immigrants - is to telephone the county elections
department. That line is often busy.

Other bureaucratic games appear to be going on. Edeline Clermont,
a member of the Haitian American Grassroots Coalition, said she
knew of several cases where voters - herself included - received
new voter cards in the mail without prompting, only to discover
that the party registration had been surreptitiously changed from
Democrat to either Republican or Independent. When Clermont went
to vote in the August primaries, she was turned away at first
because, she was told, she was not listed as a Democrat. "I told
them, you'll have to call the police and arrest me, because I'm
not leaving this place until I've voted," she said. The polling
station officials relented and let her vote by provisional
ballot.

Miami's Haitians are particularly suspicious about the way their
voting rights are regarded compared with those of the Cuban
Republicans living in Little Havana. They are convinced that the
Cubans are furiously registering non-citizens and filling in
absentee ballots for dead people, and are being allowed to get
away with it. The fear among the Haitians, meanwhile, is that if
they break the rules in similar ways, they will be caught and
punished.

Some of their suspicions are no doubt well grounded. There is a
long history of voter fraud in Miami, especially among the
Cubans. A Cuban exile columnist reported recently that absentee
ballots were being sold on Calle Ocho in Miami for $25 a pop.

The fact is, though, that disreputable elements are almost
certainly signing up non-citizens on both sides, and there's
every chance that a large number will have their votes recorded.
(The zeal with which ex-felons are tracked does not extend to
non-citizens.) More underhand tactics are in operation: the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People learnt
that a large number of voter registration forms collected from
black citizens had been dumped in a garbage can - apparently the
work of a pro-Republican operative who wanted to con them into
thinking that they had completed their paperwork.

Absentee ballots, meanwhile, are in a class of their own,
especially as the Florida legislature - with bipartisan support -
recently abolished the last meaningful impediment to absentee
fraud by eliminating the requirement for a witness signature on
applications. It used to be that witness signatures could be
tracked to spot "brokers" - middlemen who signed up dozens or
even hundreds of absentee voters. The signatures could be checked
by handwriting experts. No longer. "The floodgates are open for
absentee-ballot abuse to an unprecedented degree," predicted
Kendall Coffey, a Democratic Party lawyer who once won a case
overturning an election in Miami thanks to broker
signature-tracking.

In Little Haiti, vote organiser Carline Paul explained how the
system might work now. "There is a bar code on the absentee
ballot that can be checked against the registration application.
So they can make sure a voter is registered. But they can't check
whether he or she is dead. All the Cubans need to do is to sign
up everyone over 70, whether they are in a nursing home or in the
next world, and they can steal this election."

Every elections supervisor in Florida has been praying for months
that the November election won't be close. But what if it is? The
only certainty, as Congressman Wexler said, is that "both Bush
and Kerry lawyers will be in several courts on election night".
Thousands of attorneys are at the ready and - unlike last time -
they have their strategies and case books ready to go.

But what will they argue about? If electronic voting machines are
the issue, they will be hard put to request re-counts, as
re-counts will be meaningless. They will have 72 hours from the
close of polling - before absentee, provisional and overseas
votes have been fully counted - to mount formal challenges, and
that means sorting through an anticipated avalanche of
testimonials and allegations to map a coherent legal strategy.

It could be that there will be nothing to argue about, as the
physical evidence of vote-tampering (paper ballots and fraudulent
signatures) have become so much rarer. Or it could be that the
election is taken out of the hands of the people altogether - on
the grounds that the results are unreliable - and decided, once
again, in the Supreme Court. The problem, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff
said, is this: "We have thrown millions of dollars at correcting
the outward signs of problems, without correcting the problems
themselves."

Some people believe the best strategy is to keep fighting. There
are high hopes of introducing a voter-verified paper trail before
the 2008 presidential election, and there are signs that a
grassroots movement to restore ex-felons' voting rights is
finding support beyond Florida's boundaries.

"We're trying not to get bogged down in negatives," said Monica
Russo, a state co-ordinator for the service workers' union. "If
you do that, everyone will slit their wrists. We're union workers
- we're used to having the deck stacked against us. It's about
helping people to get through the process."

The mess that is Florida nevertheless came as a profound shock to
a group of international election monitors who toured the state
last week. Dr Brigalia Bam, who chairs South Africa's Independent
Electoral Commission, was stunned by the patchwork of
jurisdictions, rules and anomalies. "Absolutely everything is a
violation," she said. "All these different systems in different
counties with no accountability... It's like the poorest village
in Africa." November could be another agonisingly long month in
American politics.


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