Reply #4: FL: Goodman: Vote machines can't go wrong, go wrong, go wrong

[MelissaB]

Goodman: Vote machines can't go wrong, go wrong, go wrong

Published March 26, 2006
Tallahassee · It's simple. In close elections, we need to be able to recount the votes.

That's most obvious in Palm Beach County, where voters booted out the long-serving supervisor of elections, Theresa LePore, in 2004 -- partly because she didn't think the new touch-screen technology, brought in to replace those disastrous punch cards, needs paper backups.

Unfortunately, the paper trail has gone cold under LePore's successor. Instead of leading the charge for change, Arthur Anderson is taking it slow.

But Anderson's complacency isn't the only roadblock to a paper trail.

Here's a potentially bigger hurdle: Florida has rewritten its elections law to eliminate almost all manual recounts in touch-screen voting.

The reasoning is that the computerized touch-screens are incapable of error. After all, the machine won't let you overvote or undervote -- that is, vote for too many candidates or unintentionally leave blanks, the major problems in past election challenges.

Just one problem.

The machines can be wrong.

Ion Sancho, Leon County elections head since 1988, is a self-described maverick and a stickler for making every vote count. In the shambles of 2000, voting here went virtually error-free.

Last year, Sancho discovered the supposedly impossible -- that Diebold Election Systems touch screens and optical-scanning machines had serious security flaws.

And now he's paying for his audacity. Possibly with his job.


More: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnists/sfl-phoward26mar26,0,1052337.column