Florida Fiasco May Lead to Voting Reforms

Dec. 18 -- In Palm Beach County, Fla., a candidate sued to contest the election results. He got a hand recount, but still lost the race. The case pointed out the need for voting reform.

That was 1984.

The 2000 election fiasco in Florida has given new life to a movement to change the way the nation votes and counts its ballots — a once-quiet movement around for decades.

The 1984 case, over an election for property appraiser in the county, was included in a 1988 study commissioned by the federal government on the accuracy of computerized vote tallying.

It called for voting reforms, including new vote-counting technology, but got little national attention.

“This has fallen into a black hole from the get-go — until now,” said Roy Saltman, a computer scientist who authored the report for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

But the voting debacle in Florida this year — much of it also centered on voting machines in Palm Beach — shed new light nationally, and brought new passions, to election problems throughout America.

“We have had a five-week-long video of what is wrong with the process,” said Robert Ritchie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy in Takoma Park, Md. “This whole experience has freed people up to think of all kinds of reforms.”

Legislating Election Reforms

From Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush has called for a bipartisan commission to look at voting problems, to Orange County, Calif., where officials are discussing investing as much as $50 million in a new electronic, paper-free voting system, election reforms have moved to the top of legislative agendas.

In Washington, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., plan to introduce legislation next year that would establish a permanent, federal commission to study how elections are administered, makes recommendations to improve them and provides federal funds to local municipalities to implement the reforms.