Fla. Election Reform Gets Governor’s Go-Ahead

Gov. Jeb Bush signed Florida’s elections reform package Wednesday in the county that was ground zero in the disputed presidential election eventually won by his brother.

The measure drew praise from Democrat Al Gore, who was in Florida for the first time since losing both the state and the presidency in November.

The governor completed the ceremonial bill signing surrounded by faces familiar from the drawn-out election battle, including Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, designer of the “butterfly ballot” that some Democrats said was so confusing it cost Gore thousands of votes.

“From the confusion of the election, we have built a system that will be the envy of the nation,” Jeb Bush said.

The actual bill will be signed later, but the governor didn’t wait to organize separate ceremonies in Palm Beach and Volusia counties.

Both were among four counties where Gore asked for recounts after the Nov. 7 vote, and both voted for Gore over George W. Bush, who won the presidency after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the recount in Florida on Dec. 12.

State lawmakers passed the reform bill Friday, approving a $32-million package designed to prevent another recount debacle.

The measure will eliminate punch-card and hand-counted paper ballots, with their dimples and hanging chads, and mechanical-lever voting machines. Precincts will be required to have optical-scanning systems in place for the 2002 fall election.

In the state coincidentally, Gore said he has kept a low profile because America needs time to recover from last fall’s debacle.

“I decided to observe a period in which I would not enter the public arena to criticize what the new president was doing,” the former vice president said.

“I didn’t think that would be appropriate after what we’ve been through,” Gore told several thousand people at a Travel Industry Assn. of America conference in Orlando.

Jeb Bush promised that Florida would no longer be seen as a joke at election time.

“Florida was made the laughingstock of late-night television,” he said. “Now I can proudly say we saw some of the problems that existed, and in a bipartisan way, we pulled together.”

LePore, who received heavy criticism during the recount, called the reform a relief. She is a newly registered independent, saying she dropped her party affiliation in part because of the way Democrats treated her after the election.