Bobbie Brinegar, president of the Miami-Dade chapter of the League of Women Voters and a fiercely nonpartisan advocate for election reform, is even more blunt. "There's very little chance we'll have a fair election in Florida," she says. "Very little chance." It seems crass to compare the chaos of Nov. 7, 2000, to the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001, but in the elections business the comparison has a certain resonance. The events in Florida in 2000 were transformational; in the aftermath of that debacle, election reform advocates pointed to all that went wrong as proof that Americans had ignored, for too long, the mechanics of their democracy. Nov. 7 was a wake-up call, and afterward reform advocates were given license to think big, to consider all options for making elections fairer, more equitable. These would include small, obvious, pressing reforms -- getting rid of punch-card voting machines, for instance. But bigger changes were also envisioned after 2000. How should states manage their registration rolls? Should jurisdictions advocate absentee balloting, and early voting? In Florida, and in the half dozen other states that impose a lifetime voting ban on people convicted of felonies, there were calls to rethink these laws, or at least to alter the clearly shoddy ways in which they'd been implemented in 2000. Visionaries even saw far-reaching initiatives taking hold: Should we consider instant-runoff voting? And could we please, finally, rid ourselves of the Electoral College? For all that was proposed, however, remarkably little has been achieved. Many of the improvements in Florida, as in the rest of the nation, were cosmetic; lawmakers moved quickly to make changes, but their reforms were often quick fixes. In Florida, where the election mess had been blamed on punch-card voting machines, officials looked for a technological solution to the state's democratic woes. In 2001, lawmakers here banned punch-card voting machines. Many local officials then had a choice to make -- should they go with optical scan ballots (the fill-in-the-bubble paper ballots that are counted by machines), or should they install paperless electronic touch-screen machines? Officials in smaller counties chose optical scan, while most of the larger counties chose the electronic systems. In the upcoming election, slightly more than half of Florida's voters will find touch-screen machines at the polls, while the rest will vote on opti-scan. It wasn't long after the state adopted touch-screen systems that the machines proved to be just as troublesome as punch cards. On Sept. 10, 2002, Miami-Dade County, the state's largest, used electronic machines for the first time in its primary election. Election Day was a disaster, mostly because the voting systems, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., failed to start up on time, resulting in delays of several hours before some precincts were opened for voting. The main contest in the race pitted Janet Reno, the former U.S. attorney general, against Bill McBride for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The initial count showed Reno losing by more than 8,000 votes -- but as officials checked and rechecked the machines over a process of weeks, they "found" thousands of additional votes for Reno. Eventually, Reno's margin of defeat was determined to be within the legal limit allowing her to challenge the results -- but by the time all the votes were found, she'd missed the deadline to challenge. In the aftermath of the Sept. 10 fiasco in Miami-Dade, voting-rights activists from all over the county got together to form the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. Amidst all the turmoil in this state, the group is the best example of public democracy Florida has to offer -- a rebellious, fearless and fiercely nonpartisan citizens' group that aims to bring accuracy, if not honor, back to Florida elections. Every Wednesday evening for the past two years, the group, composed of two dozen or so lawyers, civil rights experts, poll workers, labor leaders and ordinary citizens, has met in a dreary third-floor conference room at the Florida ACLU. Their meetings are intense, sometimes fractious, but also, surprisingly, a lot of fun. In the middle of an intricate discussion on the complexities of election law at one recent get-together, giggles broke out when someone sketched a sign on a yellow legal pad and held it up for the room to see. The solution to Florida's election woes? "GLENDA MUST GO!" the sign said. Voting rights activists in Florida responded to the Sept. 10 primary by calling for what they said were practical fixes to the problems they saw with touch screens. Specifically, members of the coalition asked Hood to consider a "manual recount" procedure for touch-screen systems. Most touch-screen machines produce elaborate internal logs documenting everything that happens to that machine in the course of a day of voting -- the time it was turned on and off, the mode it was in during the election, the number of voters who used the machine, and possibly much more information, including printouts of each ballot cast. Voting machine firms have always touted these internal logs as a security feature. So in the event of a question over an electronic machine's results, reformers asked, why couldn't election officials look at the system's internal logs to determine if the machine functioned correctly during the race? Examining machine logs would seem to be a sensible safeguard against election mischief -- but for reasons that remain unclear, Hood decided that officials should never consult these internal logs. To carry out her edict, she called on the Florida Legislature to pass a law that would have prohibited manual recounts on touch-screen machines. In response, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition mounted a campaign to defeat the bill, and after a groundswell of public support, the bill failed. But in April, after the legislative defeat, Hood quietly issued an administrative election rule -- which did not need to be approved by the Legislature -- to achieve exactly what the defeated bill would have achieved, the prohibition of manual recounts on voting machines. To her critics, Hood's actions on the manual recount issue epitomize her general attitude toward election law; she rules high-handedly, they say, without regard for public sentiment. In 2000 and in 2002, Florida experienced massive election failures; clearly, these events would have caused voters to lose confidence in Florida's election plan. But Hood failed to grasp this "post-Nov. 7" public mood, the need for greater trust in the voting equipment, says Martha Mahoney, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law and a member of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. Instead of moving to reassure voters by mandating closer study of touch-screen systems, Hood moved to limit the ways in which elections officials could scrutinize election results. Indeed, despite a couple of years' worth of examples from around the country showing that touch-screen systems are just as fallible as other bits of modern technology (including the example of Florida's 2002 primary), Hood has bizarrely maintained that the voting systems in Florida are flawless. "The track record shows that since 2002, when electronic voting equipment's been used in Florida, that we've delivered successful elections," she told CNN recently. "There have not been problems with the equipment that's been used." Jeb Bush, too, claims that the election equipment in the state is perfect. Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Bush, told Salon that the chaos that Miami-Dade experienced in 2002 was the result of "human error" -- the election problems were caused by poll workers, not by machines. This theory is contradicted by independent reports of what occurred in that election. For instance, the Miami-Dade County Inspector General has documented (PDF) the many and various ways in which the ES&S systems failed in the 2002 primary, noting in particular the systems' inability to start up on time. Despite this evidence, Bush maintains that the only people who question Florida's voting machines are Democrats, and they only do it to boost voter turnout. "Every time that liberal Democrats say that the election is in question, every vote should count, it is an effort to try to mobilize their base and that's it," Bush told the Miami Herald in July. "And it should be discounted, deeply, because it is purely politics." Martha Mahoney, though, points out that there are many Republicans who favor stricter scrutiny of electronic machines; counting every vote is not a dream only of Democrats. In fact, the Know Your Vote Counts Act of 2004, a proposal in the U.S. House to require voter-verifiable paper trails in electronic voting systems, counts among its co-sponsors dozens of Republicans, including five from Florida. One of them is Katharine Harris, the Bushes' former vote-counting consigliere, who was elected to Congress in 2002. In supporting a paper trail in voting machines, is Harris trying, as Bush suggests, to mobilize Democrats? That's hard to believe. After Hood issued her rule prohibiting recounts in electronic machines, the Florida chapter of the ACLU sued her, challenging her authority to issue such an order. Hood lost the suit, and was forced to rewrite the rule; now, a revised rule governing recounts on electronic machines could come down from Hood's office anytime before Election Day. Activists aren't sure, though, that the new rule will be any more fair than the rule Hood first devised -- still, says Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, it's better for activists to be waiting for a possibly unfair rule before the election than to find out about unfair rules on the day of the election, which is what occurred in 2000. That's the main difference, he says, between this presidential election and the last one -- voting-rights advocates are prepared this time. "We've been working up to our eyeballs on preventive action," he says. "We're in a battle over the rules of the game. The game is going to be decided by who makes the rules of the game -- who decides who gets purged, who's permitted to register, whether the machines are going to be audited and reliable, will they have the capacity to do a recount in case a recount is necessary, are the votes going to be counted or thrown out." This is the battle that's been raging in Florida during the past few months. Will the rules of the game be permissive, tending to enfranchise voters rather than disenfranchise them, looking to provide greater assurance that all votes will been counted rather than less -- or will the rules go the other way? A couple of weeks before Election Day, the answer is still unclear. Hood is currently the subject of several legal challenges over her elections procedures. Rep. Wexler has sued her in federal court to demand that machines in the state be equipped with voter-verifiable paper trails. In the case, which begins on Monday, it's conceivable that a judge will order the state to institute some kind of remedy -- such as paper ballots for voters who don't trust the touch-screens -- at the polls this year.
