Floridians Watch Touch-Screen Ballots in Action

It took Mischelle Townsend precisely 75 minutes to do what her guests couldn’t in a month: count the votes.

Ever since the Riverside County elections supervisor launched the nation’s largest use of so-called touch-screen voting technology in November, she has welcomed a steady stream of visitors. But her latest guests--election supervisors from three Florida counties where the presidential election tumbled into a brier patch--stood out.

They watched last week, wide-eyed and with a palpable sense of liberation, as Townsend closed the polls on a special election at 8 p.m. At 9:15, she announced that Cherry Valley Republican Russ Bogh had captured a seat in the California Assembly, and at 9:22, she posted the results on the Internet.

No paper ballots. No recount. No chads.

“There were smiles and hugs,” Townsend said. “They’ve been through a lot.”

All three election supervisors--from Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties--said they hope to adopt the technology, possibly by next year.

“If you are going to clearly solve the problem, touch-screen voting is the way to do it,” said Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections David Leahy. “When you can say, ‘These are the final results. We got them quick, we got them early and we got them right,’ that’s where we need to be. That’s where you get your confidence.”

Riverside County became the first in California to adopt touch-screen voting wholesale on Nov. 7. The technology, which works like an ATM, was used at 715 polling locations from Corona to the Arizona border--serving 600,000 registered voters--and it went off without a hitch.

Across the country that night, election supervisors in southern Florida were learning that their tallies would settle a virtual tie in the presidential race--and that there were questions about the integrity of the Florida vote.

The election degenerated into recounts and court battles that lasted a month, until Al Gore finally conceded to George W. Bush.

The Florida vote--like most across the nation--was conducted with paper punch-card ballots that many now believe are antiquated. Searching for technology to restore Florida’s faith in elections, Leahy, Broward County Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant and Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore arrived at Riverside County’s election headquarters at 6 a.m. last Tuesday.

They watched poll workers open precincts, and interviewed voters after they had cast their ballots. They wanted to know how touch-screen votes were counted (they are recorded on cartridges that are fed into computers).

Townsend gave a presentation on a recount she undertook recently after a Moreno Valley school board race. The second count was over in a few minutes, and although a count of absentee votes turned up some differences, none of the 70,000 votes cast on the touch-screen system in that race had been recorded incorrectly.

The touch-screen system can be programmed for use in a variety of languages--which is crucial in Florida, where ballots are offered in English, Spanish and Creole. And such systems can alert voters if they have cast too many votes or have failed to vote--the so-called overvotes and undervotes that plagued the Florida recount.

The Florida Legislature is weighing a proposal this month that would require uniform election technology across the state, a plan that could throw a wrench in the election officials’ hopes to adopt touch-screen technology.

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Bush ally who became a lightning rod during the election when she rejected hand counting of ballots, has proposed that Florida lease an optical-scan system for the 2002 elections, then revisit the issue before 2004. Optical-scan systems are paper ballots that are fed through a machine that detects overvotes and undervotes.

“I don’t know if you can really say which way they are going to come down on the issue,” Florida Division of Elections Director Clay Roberts said Monday. “Sometime before the 4th of May, the powers that be will make that decision.”

The touch-screen technology is not without its detractors.

Some critics say the system is a steppingstone to Internet voting, which could lead to fraud. The most vehement criticism has come from civic activists who believe the technology could disenfranchise minorities and senior citizens, groups that statistics show are less familiar with computers and computerized systems.

And there are concerns that the system does not have a paper trail to comfort an electorate already skeptical of their voting clout.

But Townsend and the Florida contingent say those problems can be overcome through voter education.

“Some people just have to have a piece of paper. They want to see something in front of them other than a screen,” Leahy said. “But I think people will get over that once they get used to the system--and once they have seen what I have.”

The touch-screen machines are expensive. Election officials estimate they would cost more than $60 million in the three southeast Florida counties--six times what it would cost to install optical-scan voting equipment.

But Oliphant said she considers it a sound investment to reaffirm the Florida electorate’s faith: “They give me the money, I buy the machines.”