http://www.miamiherald.com/418/story/397192.htmlThe outsiders won.
After Tuesday's election, our notorious, expensive, untrustworthy, touch-screen voting gadgetry will be tossed onto the trash heap of capricious technology.
Ridding Florida of these machines was a triumph of political mavericks and computer geeks and incessant bloggers and disgruntled voters, worried that paperless votes, by the thousands, had simply vanished.
The revolutionaries took on the election industry and corporate lobbyists and a political establishment that sure as hell didn't want to hear that they had forced local election supervisors to invest tens of millions of dollars in high-tech rubbish. But votes kept disappearing.
STATE HOUSE RACE
Doubts hung over a Broward and Palm Beach state house race in 2004, after these nifty machines indicated 134 voters apparently went to the trouble of showing up at the polls but failed to cast a vote -- although the house race was the only item on the ballot. The winning margin was 12 votes.
In a congressional election in Sarasota in 2006, 8,380 votes disappeared.
Results of a mayor's election in little Waldenburg, Ark. -- using the same brand of touch-screen voting machines that we'll be using today in Broward and Miami-Dade counties -- indicated that no one, including the candidate and his wife Roxanne, had bothered to vote for Randy Whooten. The revolutionaries saw the mess in Waldenburg as a microcosm of elections all over.
Recounts in any of these controversial touch-screen elections only regurgitated the same bizarre total. Over and over.
FLAWS IN THE SYSTEMS
Computer experts in Maryland, California, Florida, New York and Texas discovered security flaws in the computer operating systems. California got rid of most of its touch-screen systems. And when Gov. Charlie Crist, took office last year, he saw to it that Florida followed suit. By the November election, all Floridians will be marking paper ballots.
But it might be worth remembering, as we say goodbye to those infernal touch-screen machines, a troubling little detail. Ion Sancho, the Leon County elections supervisor, and an indefatigable maverick, started Florida's revolt in 2005 when he invited a computer security expert to try hacking his system. Sancho found that a marauder could alter election results and then wipe out any sign of tampering.
He was threatened by state election officials, blackballed by machine vendors. There was talk in Leon County of removing him from office. Until a few weeks later, when state computer experts in California replicated Sancho's results and declared him a hero. Oops. That marked the beginning of the end for touch screens in Florida.
SCANNED BY COMPUTERS
Except . . . Leon County didn't use touch screens. The expert had hacked into an opti-scan system. Not unlike the opti-scan systems Miami-Dade and Broward will be using in November.
Paper ballots will still be scanned by computers run on proprietary operating codes, considered trade secrets by the manufacturers. They're still inaccessible to the tough, independent computer scientists who could test their security. And federal and state testing labs have already demonstrated shameful, subservient deference to the manufacturers.
So there's still no transparency when it comes to the basic mechanism of democracy.
The outsiders who think they won might need to think again.
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