What if you were a registered voter in Palm Beach County? How could you ever again have confidence in the election process there? Every time those bozos counted the votes, they got different totals! Some have suggested that's because some of the people who have been doing the recounting were the same people who had trouble figuring out the ballot on election day.
Can you imagine being in the position of the Supervisor of Elections up there? She was the one who designed the ballot. Then, when the doggie do hit the fan, she wouldn't stand behind it. She provided the swing vote to go for a hand recount— even after the ballots had been counted twice by machine— in essence, admitting incompetence. Can you imagine this woman running for reelection on this record?
Like Monroe County and all the other counties in Florida, Palm Beach County has a three-member Canvassing Board to watch over the ballot-counting process: A judge, a County Commissioner and the Supervisor of Elections. The members of the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board for this most recent election are all Democrats.
Nevertheless, the judge on the panel voted against a third recount. The Supervisor of Elections sided with that shrill female County Commissioner to authorize still another recount, this time by hand. Then, they brought in about a thousand other people to sit around and hold the ballots up to the light to see if they could see something the machines couldn't.
We also heard an unconfirmed report that they had called the Psychic Hotline to get some of those people in to hold the ballots up to their foreheads to try to read the minds of the voters. However, they only wanted psychics who are registered Democrats. Go figure.
A potentially similar fiasco was nipped in the bud here in Monroe County following the Republican primary election when Sonny McCoy squeaked by Sullins Stuart by 12 votes. For that election, the Canvassing Board here in Monroe County was made up of County Commissioner Shirley Freeman, Judge Susan Vernon and Supervisor of Elections Harry Sawyer.
Freeman asked for a vote among the Canvassing Board members to order a recount. Vernon and Sawyer said no. (Of course, we later found out that Shirley Freeman had actively worked for Stuart's election, which is against the law for somebody serving on the Canvassing Board. She subsequently recused herself from the board for the general election.)
It is likely that a machine recount of the McCoy-Stuart ballots would have come out exactly the same— just as the results of the automatic recount of the presidential balloting in Monroe County exactly matched the results of the first count.
The reason for this is that the system used in Monroe County may be the most modern and efficient in the state. Who would have thought that, considering the backwardness of many aspects of our government here?
The system is called Accuvote. When you vote using this system, you simply mark your ballots with a black pen and feed it into a scanner-counter before you leave the polling room. This is a "mark sense" system, similar to the system many of us saw on exams in high school and college.
Many counties around the state— like Palm Beach— still use relatively primitive systems that require the voter to punch holes in a paper ballot. If you've been following the seemingly never-ending election coverage, you know that thousands of ballots were reportedly thrown out in these counties because voters tried to vote for two candidates in the same race (duh!) or because of other problems associated with the design of the ballot or punching the holes.
What we now know is that this level of vote invalidation has apparently been routine during elections in other parts of the state and the nation for years. The fact that every vote doesn't count has been the little secret of election officials across the country. But the razor-thin margin in the Bush-Gore race has focused a national spotlight on these widespread inefficiencies.
They've always been there. It's just that they never made much of a difference before.
Curious, we asked Harry Sawyer how many ballots were "thrown out" here in the recent election.
"Accuvote recognized irregularities on about 95 ballots," he said, "but the scanner spit those ballots back out, uncounted, before the voters left the room. All of these voters then had the opportunity to get new ballots and revote.
When the statewide machine recount for the presidential race was ordered last week, it took Sawyer's office only 15 minutes to accomplish that. And the results were exactly the same as in the first count: George Bush 16,059; Al Gore 16,483.
Sawyer wasn't surprised. When Sullins Stuart and his attorney— and County Commissioner Shirley Freeman— were arguing for a recount after the Republican primary, Accuvote didn't give them a leg to stand on.
"There was a power failure up the Keys on election day," Stuart's hotshot Miami lawyer lamented. "That could have caused the voting machines to malfunction."
Not so, Sawyer said. All of the Accuvote machines have battery backup.
Well, then, the attorney argued, the machines themselves could have erred. Everybody knows that machines aren't perfect.
It is unlikely that the machines erred, Sawyer said.
Before every election, every Accuvote machine undergoes a stringent logic and accuracy test. A pile of ballots are fed into each machine. The results of this little sample "election" is known. Sample ballots include "problem" ballots, such as overvotes and other irregularities that should kick these ballots out of the machine.
If the test results vary from the known actual on a particular machine, that machine would be taken out of service.
How often has that happened here, we asked Sawyer.
"Never," he said. "If those machines ever malfunction, they don't start counting inaccurately, they just quit. And we have backup machines in every precinct."
Sawyer budgeted $150,000 back in 1993 to bring Accuvote to Monroe County. And the County Commission approved it.
So why isn't this system used all over the state and the country? One reason might be financial. Such a system would be more expensive in larger counties and County Commissions may have other fiscal priorities.
Also, the almost-routine invalidation of thousands and thousands of votes never became a scandal— until now— because few people knew about it and even fewer were concerned about it.
Regardless of what presidential candidate finally wins, we would now expect County Commissions across Florida and the nation to move quickly to modernize voting equipment. You may want to rush out and invest in the stocks of the companies that make and sell these machines.
We would also expect voter registration and voter participation in elections to increase dramatically in the wake of the Bush-Gore spectacle. There is no longer any doubt that every vote counts!