2 Florida Counties Show Election Day’s Inequities

Winding slowly through Florida’s northern Panhandle, the muddy-brown Ochlockonee River neatly divides the best and the worst in America’s troubled presidential balloting systems.

To the west lies Gadsden County, which is largely poor, black and rural. On Nov. 7, one in eight Gadsden voters was effectively disenfranchised when their ballots were rejected as invalid. The spoilage rate was the highest in the state.

To the east lies Leon County, home of the prosperous state capital, Tallahassee, and two state universities. Here, fewer than two votes in 1,000 were not counted--the state’s lowest spoilage rate.

The tale of these two counties, as well as Florida’s other 65, is under intense review now as federal, state and independent panels study what went wrong in the 2000 election--and seek to ensure it won’t happen again.

“We’ve learned a great deal that we didn’t know before,” said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, a Houston-based nonpartisan organization that is funded by city, county and state governments. “And we’re still learning more.”

They’ve learned that ballot design is critical: that when poorly educated voters confront confusing ballots, the result can be thousands of unnecessary errors. That teaching people how to use the voting equipment is important too, but is rarely done. That when some counties take the time to check incoming ballots for problems--and then give voters a chance to fix obvious mistakes--the error rate drops dramatically. And that voter registration is a mess.

A ‘Perfect Storm’ of an Election

All this happened in a state in which the two presidential candidates finished a hairbreadth apart, in a national election so close that Florida would determine the outcome.

“What happened in Florida was like a 150-year storm event,” said James C. Smith, a former Florida attorney general and secretary of state who served as co-chairman of the governor’s task force. “Everything that could go wrong converged.”

As Congress and at least 30 states consider legislation to reform how Americans vote, Gadsden and Leon counties offer crucial lessons in what went disastrously wrong--and perhaps on how to fix it.

Both are nestled amid lush piney ridges, moss-draped streams and sandy lowlands just south of Georgia. Both overwhelmingly voted for Democrat Al Gore. Beyond that, the neighboring counties couldn’t be more different.

Gadsden, Florida’s only county with a black majority, seems caught in a time warp. One in four of its 47,000 residents lives in poverty. Cotton and tobacco plantations have died out, and so the chief industries now are tomato farms, a small mine and a cluster of state prisons.

The county’s schools rate among the state’s worst. More than one-third of its students drop out of high school. Decay is everywhere, from ruined antebellum mansions and tin-roof shacks deep in the woods to the boarded-up stores hugging the courthouse square in the county seat, Quincy.

Gadsden has a long history of voter intimidation and fraud, largely on racial grounds. But election day 2000 was mostly marked by chaos and confusion. County election officials were overwhelmed as hundreds of calls jammed their two phone lines and scores of irate voters filled the tiny office.

Denny Hutchinson was in charge. Like nearly every other elected official in Gadsden, he is white. Until he lost a reelection primary bid last year, he had served 20 years as the election supervisor, following an uncle who had held the post for 32 years before that.

To this day, Hutchinson insists “nothing went awry” in Gadsden County. “I don’t know I’d do anything different,” he said. “We did it the same way we always did.”

Indeed, Hutchinson followed state law by running a sample ballot in the local newspaper the Sunday before the Tuesday election. But with no other county or state funding, that was it for voter education. “People should know how to vote,” Hutchinson said.

Nor did instructions on how to vote come from the union and civil rights activists who crisscrossed back roads last year to register almost 2,000 new Gadsden County voters, virtually all Democrats.

“We have a lot of illiteracy,” said Vivian Kelly, a retired school principal and civil rights leader who remains a firebrand at age 81. “And we wound up with a lot of people who couldn’t read or understand the ballot.”

A Vote for Gore, and a Write-In Too

Gadsden has used a seemingly simple voting system since 1994. Voters must use a pencil to fill in an oval beside a candidate’s name on a paper ballot, a task familiar to anyone who has taken a standardized test in school. But many Gadsden voters didn’t go to school, at least not for long. And last year’s ballot was far from simple.

Eight of the 10 presidential candidates were listed in one column. The other two, plus a space for a write-in candidate, were stuck atop the next column. Used by 15 counties in all, it’s been called a “caterpillar ballot,” for the way names crawl around the page.

“A lot of people marked one in each column, or selected all 10 candidates,” said Shirley Knight, who unseated Hutchinson and became the county’s first black elections supervisor. “And a lot of people marked Al Gore’s name and then they wrote his name in the write-in column on the next column.”

Even the ballot wording was bizarre. It instructed voters to “Vote for Group” in the presidential race, but did not explain a “group.” Nowhere did it say to vote for only one presidential candidate. Ovals are between names, not beside them.

Gadsden had another problem: central-based counting. After polls closed, ballots were collected from the 16 precincts, then fed into an optical scanning machine at the main election office. Because voters were not told if they spoiled a ballot, they could not ask for another try, as the law allows.

There was a further twist. The day after the election, the canvassing board met to review uncounted ballots to see whether voters’ intents were clear on undervotes marked with Xs, check marks and stars, as well as overvotes. When they were done, they awarded 170 additional votes to Gore and 17 more to his rival, George W. Bush.

The final tally: 9,735 votes for Gore, 4,767 for Bush and 2,085 uncounted ballots. Nearly all those were overvotes.

Those, of course, were only from those allowed to vote.

“Some people got turned away,” Hutchinson said. “I don’t deny it. But it wasn’t out of hatefulness or meanness.”

He said some voters went to the wrong precinct, or hadn’t notified the board of a new address. Others failed to fill out the state mail-in applications correctly, which lists some questions vertically and others horizontally. Still others were sent away because the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles and other voter registration groups failed to file their applications.

“We had cases where schoolteachers or other folks would register people and throw the applications in the trunk of a car, and we’d never see it,” Hutchinson said. “We get a lot of that.”

Twenty miles to the east is Tallahassee, the state capital and Leon County seat. It could be another world. The city boasts high-rise hotels, upscale restaurants and gleaming state office buildings. The county is mostly urban, white and white-collar.

With 220,000 people, Leon is far larger than Gadsden. Yet, only 154 ballots were not counted of 103,418 votes cast on election day. Nearly all were undervotes from people who intentionally abstained in the presidential race.

Ion Sancho, the elections commissioner, deserves the credit. He convinced the county commission to pay for mailing sample ballots to each home and detailed voting instructions to newly registered voters.

Sancho then raised $15,000 from wealthy individuals. He produced a low-budget TV spot on voting and then persuaded the local cable TV provider to run it for half-price more than 100 times the week before the election. Local radio stations agreed to run an audio version for free. No other Florida county took such pains to educate voters.

“It’s something I believe in,” Sancho said.

Leon System Offered 2nd Chances

Like Gadsden County, Leon County used paper ballots and an optical scan system. Unlike Gadsden, all presidential candidates were listed in one column. Ovals were next to names. Voters could use pencil or pen.

More important, Leon County installed tabulating machines in all 95 precincts, not just in one central location. The difference was dramatic.

“If you make a mistake here, the machine spits it right out and you take it to the poll worker and are issued another ballot,” Sancho explained. The spoiled ballot goes in a special bag.

Sancho said any registered voter who went to a precinct, even the wrong one, was allowed to vote. Those with wrong addresses were allowed to correct them after signing an affidavit.

In addition, Leon County installed sensitive new readers on its scanning machines in 1996 to detect votes on ballots where voters wrote an X or other mark on the oval instead of darkening it. That helped lower the undervotes.

Sancho still marvels that no one in state government ever asked him how his county achieved such voting success year after year. “Not once,” he said. “Nada, zippo, zero.”

Complaints From Nearly Every County

Leon and Gadsden counties are at the extremes, but Leon is not the only county that did most things right, nor is Gadsden the only one that had trouble. In all, Florida counties used five types of voting machines, at least 10 ballot designs and laws that allowed each county to set its own standard for determining a valid vote.

Besides Gadsden, many counties counted their ballots centrally. Many confused their voters with poorly designed ballots; Palm Beach County’s two-page “butterfly ballot” became the most notorious, but it was far from unique.

Nearly every county was swamped by complaints of inexperienced poll workers who couldn’t answer questions, didn’t know the law and unfairly turned away registered voters. Weariness was a factor: In huge Hillsborough County, the average poll worker was 67 and was required to work 15 or 16 hours on election day.

As many as 5% of those who used Florida’s mail-in application forms were not entered on voter rolls, county officials said. “Motor-voter” registration was a particular failure: In some areas, as many as 15% of the voter application forms filed at state motor vehicle licensing bureaus were lost.

Florida’s 179,855 uncounted ballots far exceeded Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory over Gore after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended the contest Dec. 12.

Since then, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has held heated hearings in Tallahassee and Miami, a bipartisan task force appointed by his brother Gov. Jeb Bush has recommended sweeping reforms and media organizations have begun reviewing the disputed ballots.

On March 5, Gov. Bush endorsed the task force recommendations and urged the Legislature in Tallahassee to adopt a uniform statewide balloting standard, abolish the punch-card voting system and lease precinct-based optical scan machines in time for the 2002 elections. The estimated cost is about $20 million.

Action is far from assured. After this legislative session, warned Smith, the former attorney general and task force co-chairman, “everybody will go back to sleep and election reform will no longer have anybody’s attention.”