October 02, 2004
Democrats register voters; Republican administration throws out forms
One big difference between the 2 major political parties is voting. Republicans traditionally want to “protect the integrity of the vote,” which is code for disenfranchising minorities and keeping voter participation low.
Democrats, on the other hand, truly want to “Get Out the Vote” and work toward this goal through voter registration and education.
Well, Democrats are doing their jobs (yes - to be fair, GOP groups have voter drives too, but, as a general rule, Dems defend monority voting rigtrs, and the GOP does its best to disenfranchise any group that may be leaning Democratic, especially blacks.)
Elections offices and independent groups across the region are feverishly working on last-minute voter registration efforts before the deadline arrives Monday evening.With the hotly contested presidential race, voter registration for the 2004 election is way up - far surpassing registration numbers from 2000.
...Since the 2000 election, more than 1-million new voters have registered in Florida, state elections officials say, an increase mirrored throughout the Tampa Bay area.
In Hillsborough County, new registrations this year are three times the number registered in 2000. Pinellas County registration applications are piling in by the thousands.
Registration efforts are going strong through the weekend. Some elections offices have extended weekend hours, and registration drives are taking place at some Kmarts, Michaels Arts and Crafts stores and at the University of South Florida Sun Dome, where filmmaker Michael Moore will headline an event Sunday.
Unfortunately, Republicans are doing their jobs too.
Potentially tens of thousands of people who think they are registered to vote could be turned away at the polls Nov. 2 because their voter registration forms were not completely filled out.Secretary of State Glenda Hood said some groups registering voters are turning in application forms missing information, such as unchecked boxes on whether applicants are citizens, mentally incompetent or felons.
Also, she said the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating claims that some groups turned in fraudulent application forms or switched people's party registration without telling them.
Rectification Effort Blocked
A group seeking copies of the incomplete applications in an effort to help people complete them said some counties turned over thousands of forms until Hood's office informed supervisors that state law prohibits them from handing out copies of voter records except to specified organizations, such as political committees and parties. Now, the Washington-based Advancement Project is not receiving any of the forms and fears thousands of people will not be able to vote.
``Clearly way over the number that could determine the election,'' said Judith Browne, a lawyer with the group, which promotes multiracial participation in the democratic process. She was referring to President Bush's disputed 537-vote victory in Florida that gave him the presidency in 2000.
During that election, state and local elections officials were criticized for a host of issues, from people mistakenly removed from voter rolls to the infamous ``butterfly ballot'' in Palm Beach County that may have confused voters, leading them to vote for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.
Although the Advancement Project is not registering voters itself, it assists groups that are, including America's Families United, which tries to register voters in poor and minority communities.
America's Families United is suing the Duval County elections supervisor to get copies of 1,441 rejected applications there. Browne said a judge ruled against the group Friday. Previously, the Advancement Project received copies of forms from Miami-Dade, Orange, Hillsborough and other counties. In Miami-Dade and Broward alone, Browne said, 12,000 incomplete ballots were turned in.
``It seems like every time that we try to take steps to help voters to make sure they get on the rolls and to make sure they are protected, the state and the counties put obstacles in the way,'' she said.
Acting Duval Elections Supervisor Richard Carlberg said his office is trying to call the 1,441 applicants to let them know they won't be able to vote unless the forms are completed, but he said many of the phone numbers on the forms are not working numbers.
Hood said her office is only trying to help elections supervisors follow the law and that incomplete forms must be rejected.
......Many people could show up at the polls and be told they cannot vote, Hood said. She acknowledged that some people will blame her office.
``We recognize there are always going to be individuals out there that are going to throw bricks, who are going to try to erode voter confidence. That is most unfortunate,'' she said. ``Our responsibility is to make sure that we protect the integrity of the voting process and that we work in partnership with our supervisors to do so.''
Yeah, that’s the ticket...the integrity of the voting process...
(Of course, it’s okay if you’re a republican.)
...... An illegal favor? Longwood resident Harry Jacobs' suit pivots on a favor that Seminole elections chief Sandra Goard did for the Republicans. Goard allowed two GOP operatives to add voter identification numbers to more than 4,000 flawed absentee ballot applications that had been rejected before the election. The workers were then allowed to resubmit the corrected applications.Posted by Norwood at October 2, 2004 10:40 AMJacobs says that violated a strict 1998 Florida law -- enacted after rampant absentee ballot fraud surfaced in Miami -- that says only the voter, an immediate family member or legal guardian may fill out an application for an absentee ballot.
Two years ago, the state election office ruled that it was OK for political parties to mail and collect the absentee applications, but the voters or their close relatives or guardians must provide clear identifying information, including their voter registration numbers.
VOTE MacKenna for Supervisor of Elections-Hillsborough. http://www.rob2004.com/
Voting mystery stirs call for paper trail
Audit printers, a possible solution for electronic "undervotes," would be costly and can't be ready by Nov. 2.
By JEFF TESTERMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published October 4, 2004
AMPA - In the Aug. 31 primary, the population of a small town - 12,498 voters - appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney.
No one is sure why those voters didn't vote, or if they did, what might have happened to their votes.
Local residents declined to vote in even greater numbers in Hillsborough races for property appraiser, School Board and some judges. In fact, the "undervote" - the phenomenon in which citizens push an activation card into a touch screen voting machine but have no vote tallied for one or more races - was significantly higher in Hillsborough than in many other large Florida counties.
Palm Beach County, which uses the same Sequoia Voting Systems machines as Hillsborough, saw an undervote ranging from 3.1 percent to 8.4 percent of voter turnout, depending on the race. Broward, which uses optical scan voting machines, had an undervote of 6.4 percent on the one race open to all voters.
Hillsborough's undervote on countywide contests ranged from 9 percent in the race that re-elected State Attorney Mark Ober, to a whopping 17.5 percent in the race in which Charles "Ed" Bergmann was elected circuit judge.
In Pinellas County, which uses Sequoia machines, the undervote on countywide contests ranged from 9.1 percent in a School Board race to 13 percent in a judicial contest.
The question is: Why?
Are voters refusing to vote? Or are votes not registering on electronic machines?
Florida counties scurried to buy the voting machines after the Legislature outlawed punch-card balloting in the wake of the hanging chad controversy of the 2000 presidential election.
"I have always been concerned about the undervote on electronic machines," said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer expert at Harvard University who has written extensively about voting issues. "We don't know what happens with the votes because there is no real audit of the machines."
Mercuri maintains that fully electronic machines provide no means for the voter to confirm that the ballot cast corresponds to what is later tabulated. She believes that in some cases an unscrupulous programmer could even write code that records one result on the screen and another in a tabulation record.
Mercuri also has a feeling that the new electronic systems simply confuse voters, especially the elderly.
Hillsborough's tabulation of votes in August was beset by two significant problems: A computer server slowed to a crawl and delayed election night results; and 245 votes were never counted because a machine at an early voting site was not activated properly.
Buddy Johnson, Hillsborough's supervisor of elections, attributed the glitches to human error and believes voters should have complete confidence in the touch screen machines.
Johnson believes undervoting occurs when voters decline to vote because they know little about a race, or when they simply want to send a message that they don't care for any of the candidates on a particular slate.
"People just undervote," Johnson said.
Rob MacKenna, an Eckerd Corp. computer programmer who is the Democratic challenger to Johnson, strongly disagrees. To address the undervote question, he says, local government must pay for a paper-trail audit system as both a check on the electronic voting system and a boost to voter confidence.
MacKenna's skepticism about the cause of the undervote stems from the presidential preference primary last March, where a single question was listed on the ballot but where 255 Hillsborough voters, or 0.76 percent of the turnout, had no vote tabulated. Had 255 residents driven to the polls, signed in, walked to the touch screen machine, then decided to abandon the whole idea?
MacKenna refuses to believe it.
"The big question is, are we losing people's votes?" MacKenna said. "That's what the preliminary data seems to suggest. And that's the No. 1 thing we can't have."
Last month, MacKenna flew to a vendors show in Las Vegas to see audit printers manufactured by Sequoia. The shoe box-sized devices fit on the side of a voting machine and display a roll of audit paper under a fixed pane of glass.
The printer has cash register-style paper, easily visible to the voter, which displays the vote. It also generates a bar code that can be used with an optical scanner for recounts and election audits. Surprisingly, MacKenna said, voters who use machines with printers vote faster, apparently because they readily see their vote result and don't try to backtrack.
MacKenna's solution would not be cheap. The county would need about 4,000 printers, and at $700 each that amounts to $2.8-million. MacKenna thinks federal dollars allocated in the Help America Vote Act might be available to defray the cost.
The drive to ensure a paper audit of touch screen voting machines got new impetus last week when a federal appeals court revived a lawsuit by Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, challenging the electronic machines. Wexler believes a paper audit is necessary for a recount of votes on touch screen devices.
But don't look for the audit printers at the Nov. 2 general election. The printers haven't been certified by the state of Florida and can't be ready by election day.
Johnson shrugs off the paper audit issue as moot for the time being. "We push for every good innovation we can get," he said. "If this thing works and gives voters greater confidence, I absolutely will look at it.
"But if I can't do it by November, why try? It's just a political issue."
Mercuri, the computer science expert, says there is a silver lining around all the doubt being cast on touch screen and other electronic voting machines. More people are voting by paper absentee ballots, she said, and that means their votes are less likely to end up being undervotes.
-- Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Jeff Testerman can be reached at 813 226-3422 or testerman@sptimes.com
© Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved
