[H2][A href="vny!://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/03/Perspective/Voting_booth__06_is_d.shtml"][FONT size=2]vny!://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/03/Perspective/Voting_booth__06_is_d.shtml[/FONT][/A][/H2] [H2][A href="vny!://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/03/Perspective/Voting_booth__06_is_d.shtml"]Voting booth '06 is dark and deep[/A][/H2]By DIANE ROBERTS
Published September 3, 2006
[HR noShade SIZE=1] It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes.
That's traditionally been attributed to Josef Stalin. It's not likely he ever said it, however, what with his general hostility toward voting. It wouldn't sound all that cute in Russian, either.
But surely the sentiment has been uttered early and often here in Florida, where screwy elections have virtually become an art form. Only six years ago Florida suffered a plague of butterfly ballots, a storm of dangling and pregnant chads, monumentally messed-up voter rolls, start-and-stop-recounts, labyrinthine lawsuits and the dubious ministrations of then-secretary of state, now Senate candidate, Katherine Harris. Banana republics called Florida a "banana republic;" Fidel Castro offered to send us "democracy educators."
Now here you are in 2006, standing before the touchscreen, filling out the optical scan form, mailing your absentee ballot, are you confident that your vote will be counted accurately and fairly? Sue Cobb, the current secretary of state, would have you believe that all is well. This, despite a federal judge's ruling in the suit brought by the League of Women Voters that a state law restricting the ability of nonprofits, unions and civic groups - any except political parties, which are exempt - to register voters was unconstitutional. Still, she expects "a smooth election cycle this fall." In her television spots and public service announcements, Cobb is soothing, reassuring. She is, she says, "comfortable."
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho, on the other hand, is not. He is not worried about Leon County, which uses highly accurate optical scan machines, but has concerns about statewide voting.
Sancho tested some Diebold voting machines earlier this year and found they could be hacked: tabulators manipulated, election winners changed into vote losers without a trace of the changes to the machines' memory cards.
The state of California ran the same tests as Sancho and got the same results. Diebold, as well as Elections Systems & Software and Sequoia (maker of the machines used in Pinellas and Hillsborough), the other two companies licensed to sell voting technology in Florida, responded by refusing to do business with Sancho.
The University of California computer scientist who helped conduct the tests sent Sancho a thank-you note. You'd think Gov. Bush and Secretary of State Cobb, the official charged by the Constitution to ensure free and fair elections, would thank him as well. But no: The governor threatened to have him removed from office. The secretary of state said he was "undermining voter confidence" and suggested federal marshals might be sent in.
Lance DeHaven-Smith, a professor at Florida State University's Askew School of Public Policy and Administration, suggests it's the state which is undermining voter confidence: "They're raising doubts about the merits of the whole elections system. You'd think state officials would want the appearance, at least, of absolute propriety."
However, not only does the state not much care about the appearance, evidence suggests the state isn't terribly interested in the reality of equitable elections in the sunshine, either. Ben Wilcox, executive director of Florida Common Cause, a nonpartisan election watchdog, says "since 2000, there's been an attempt to suppress the vote."
He points to 2004, when then-Secretary of State Glenda Hood bragged that Florida "leads the nation" in voting reform, despite producing a database of ineligible voters which failed to include Hispanic felons and overgenerously represented African- Americans - some of whom were genuine felons, and many of whom were eligible voters wrongly listed as felons.
A cynical person might remark that African-Americans tend to vote Democratic, while Hispanics (at least in South Florida) tend to vote Republican. In any case, the Jeb Bush administration tried its hardest to keep that error-riddled list secret and nearly succeeded, only to be forced by the courts to give in to Florida's open records laws.
Maybe almost anything would seem like an improvement over to the old punch card voting machines that drove counters crazy in 2000. But even shiny new technology couldn't prevent thousands of ballots going missing in Broward County in 2004. Nor could supposedly streamlined regulations stop the registration scams perpetrated on campuses where students were invited to sign petitions for legalizing medical marijuana or fighting child abuse, only to find that they'd signed a blind sheet allowing somebody to enroll them in the GOP.
The Legislature did not sit idly by. Laws were passed exempting touchscreens - the ones Leon County, the state of California and others have determined can be tinkered with - from manual recounts. Half of Floridians use touchscreens.
"There are more safeguards on a slot machine in Vegas," says Lance DeHaven-Smith. "The alarming thing about the governor, the secretary of state and the Legislature is that they don't seem to want a real, verifiable back-up paper trail. It's as if they want there to never again be a recount."
What's certain is that the elections process has been so politicized in Florida and other states that it reminds some government reform and civil rights groups of the bad old days of the 1950s. The avowedly-left-of-center People for the American Way recently published a report on voter suppression called "The New Face of Jim Crow" in which they cite new restrictions on voting state by state. Florida, as you can imagine, takes up more than its fair share of space, especially now that voters must show an ID and a picture. This is, we are told, to combat "voter fraud." There's just one thing: we have no voter fraud problem.
"There's so much partisanship coming out of the secretary's office," says Ben Wilcox. We used to elect our secretary of state: since 2002, the office has gone to a political appointee, beholden for her job to the governor, not the people - a change voted in by Floridians when they "simplified" the state Constitution in the pre-Jeb days of 1998.
So now it's clear that whichever party is in charge of who gets to vote and who gets to count those votes wields disproportionate power over our elections. Democrats might like their own Katherine Harris moment. But election reform experts don't think a change in party control will be any healthier for American democracy: "What's needed," says Wilcox, "is a change in the way we choose our chief elections officer."
After the schism of 2000, after living six years in a country split, can we ever escape the red-blue divide? "Elections should not be part of a partisan political process," says Sancho, giving the voter something to ponder as he or she casts a ballot in Tuesday's primary: "What we have now is part of this larger American problem where winning is everything. What about honor?"
Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, teaches English and writing at Florida State University.
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