South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Voting fixes: New machines and a `none of the above' button

by Michael Mayo

Published December 5, 2006 Sun-Sentinel

The latest election went relatively smoothly in South Florida, but a close U.S. House race in Sarasota shows that we need two fixes for our flawed electronic touch-screen machines.

First, add a "none of the above" option to every race on electronic ballots.

Second, ditch the touch-screen machines entirely.

"I think you're going to start seeing a push toward opti-scan machines," said Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom.

Now that a federal research agency has issued a draft report concluding that paperless machines, including the ones used in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, "cannot be made secure," the push should become a stampede.

It's going to be a tough bill for Broward County officials and taxpayers to swallow, junking 6,000 Election Systems & Software iVotronic machines after only four years and admitting a $23 million mistake. But common sense and voter confidence dictate a return to a paper-based voting system by the 2008 presidential election.

"Out of what's available, I'd prefer opti-scan," Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said Monday.

With optical scan ballots, voters mark their choices and feed the sheet through tabulators at the precinct to make sure every race is properly marked. Ballots with no votes or too many votes in a given race can be detected and corrected on the spot. The best part: Paper ballots mean you can actually count something in a recount.

For a while, the prospect of adding expensive printers to touch-screen machines sounded good. But that just might be throwing good money after bad.

Better to start over.

Snipes said her office has begun researching the costs of an optical-scan system. The County Commission controls spending and has final say over which voting system will be used.

Snipes has one reservation about a switch to opti-scan: early voting. She said an electronic system is better for the unwieldy number of different ballot styles needed at early voting sites. She said she might propose a "blended system" of opti-scan for Election Day precincts and touch-screen machines at early voting sites. That still leaves the issue of a paper trail for the early votes.

The draft report released last week by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-partisan federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, stated the obvious: Having no paper trail on touch-screen machines erodes public confidence and leaves questions about security.

No paper trail makes things tricky when you have a close race that requires a recount. That's the situation in Florida's 13th Congressional District, where Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes out of 237,000 cast.

Making things trickier: the high number of blank votes on electronic machines.

That was a big problem this year in Sarasota County, which uses the same iVotronic machines as Broward and Miami-Dade; there were 18,380 ballots that came up blank in the Buchanan-Jennings race. The abstention rate of 18 percent in that race in Sarasota was far higher than other major races.

It's impossible to say if the undervotes were caused by a bad ballot design that allowed voters to miss the race, a deliberate snub by voters disgusted with a negative campaign or a computer bug that swallowed votes and sent them into a digital black hole.

Undervotes have always been a part of elections, with some people not voting every race and issue. But some seem out of whack on these machines. Of 411,489 ballots cast in Broward last month, there were only 3,627 undervotes for governor (0.8 percent), but 35,743 (8.6 percent) for state attorney general and 40,168 (9.7 percent) for chief financial officer.

As long as electronic machines are in use, there's an easy fix. Simply add "none of the above/abstain" to every race, and program the machines to prohibit undervotes.

"Excellent idea," Snipes said. "It sounds like a viable option."

That is, until the better option is embraced. Opti-scan would be optimal.

Michael Mayo can be reached at mmayo@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4508.

Copyright © 2006, Sun-Sentinel Co. & South Florida Interactive Inc.