Florida fiasco keeps Bush's votes in safe hands - part 2

1.00pm - By ANDREW GUMBEL (continued)

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 (FAC).

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 1637 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 Centre 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 dreamed 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 US$25,000 to Republican candidates in Florida - turned out to be top-heavy with black voters (including about 2000 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 deliberately 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.

>> Part 3

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