Florida Fiasco May Lead to Voting Reforms

Dec. 18, 2000 -- 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.

“The situation in Florida with different counties using different equipment, different standards and different methodologies in the conduct of the election is a clear indication that reform is needed,” Feinstein said in a statement.

Much of the focus on reform, experts say, will be on antiquated and varying vote-counting machines in municipalities across the nation.

In 1990, the federal government did create standards for voting equipment, but they are not mandatory. Many states have written some standards into their election laws. But older voting equipment is usually exempt.

Voting systems vary radically from state to state. Punch card machines that produce chad — pieces of perforated paper that are supposed to fall out when a ballot is punched — are used by as many as 31 percent of all registered voters, according to Kim Brace, president of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm that specializes in election administration and redistricting.

Those machines caused havoc in Florida when the chad stayed partially attached, producing ballots with the so-called pregnant or dimpled chad.

Doing Away With Chad

Chad became a household word during the Florida election dispute.

Saltman, now a retired computer scientist who has consulted on election equipment in Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador, said he was using the word nearly three decades ago when he drafted an earlier report on reforming voting equipment.

In his 1988 report, he called for eliminating the punch-card systems. Saltman, who is passionate about the subject, laments that the idea of reform did not catch on years ago. “It has been extremely sad, frustrating and disappointing to me,” he said.

“It’s like many problems, people don’t have much interest in them,” says Edwin Meese, an attorney general under President Reagan and now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.“Once the election is over, people forget about it.”

Until this unprecedented presidential election, the nation for the most part has not experienced close national races. And when local races are close, like the Palm Beach County property appraiser’s race in 1984, they don’t always make it to the front pages.

“The race for dogcatcher is not too exciting so it ends up on page 14,” Brace said. “Then we had this race for this small office called the president of the United States, and suddenly, it made it to page one.”

As the issue heats up in Congress and in legislative bodies across the nation, officials are likely to look at national voting standards and all kinds of technology to change the system.

“We could have uniform standards in each state, the [U.S.] Supreme Court made it clear that this is an equal protection problem,” said Pam Karlan, a professor of public interest law at Stanford University and a former voting rights attorney for the NAACP. “It is now a federal issue. Congress has special powers and responsibilities to make sure everybody’s votes count. I would look at the technologies including, for example, the touch-screen touching system that was used successfully in Riverside, Calif.”

“People got to the ATM and make fewer mistakes there than when they vote,” Karlan says.

ABCNEWS’ Dave Marash contributed to this report.