DoYouEverWonder
07-21-2008, 02:21 AM
That's right, FL election laws have gone from bad to worse. Apparently, Good ol' Chaingang Charlie Crist's idea of election reform was to buy new machines, while throwing away any chance of ever doing a proper recount or even a proper audit of the machines. They don't call Florida the Banana Republic for nothing.
State law does not allow for precise recount
July 19, 2008
TALLAHASSEE - With the ghosts of the 2000 presidential election still haunting the state, Gov. Charlie Crist pushed lawmakers last year to require all voting machines to leave a "paper trail" that would lay to rest concerns about votes being accurately counted.
"If there's a need for a recount, I think it's important that we have something to recount," Crist said as the state junked touch-screen voting machines that did not leave paper records of individual votes.
But as the state heads into what is expected to be a record-setting year for voter turnout, Florida law does not allow for every ballot to be counted in case of a close election.
"There is not such a thing as a manual recount in Florida," said Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning. "It is very dangerous to tell candidates that, yes, the law has a section that says 'manual recount' but we're not going to look at those ballots."
The reason: Despite pleas from Browning, lawmakers have not authorized a full manual recount of all ballots in close elections.
Instead, canvassing boards in each of Florida's 67 counties will only manually count the ballots that were untabulated by machines reading the marked-in bubbles or connected lines.
<snip>
But some elections officials say there is not enough time to do a full manual recount in large counties like Miami-Dade, where more than 770,000 voters went to the polls in the 2004 presidential election. State law only allows 14 days after the election to certify the results.
And they say authorizing a full manual recount is akin to admitting a lack of faith in optical-scan voting machines that have cost tens of millions of dollars to buy and test in the past 18 months.
"We get them and immediately turn around and say, 'If we have a close election, we don't trust those machines,' " said Ron Labasky, a longtime attorney for the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. "If you felt that way, then you better count everything by hand."
Not all elections supervisors agree. Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho led the push for ridding the state of touch-screen voting when he publicly showed how results could be altered with no detection.
He said voters are "stunned" when told there will be no manual recount of all ballots in a close election.
"We have failed our citizens," said Sancho, arguing that lawmakers should allow more time for a full manual recount in close elections or at least a scientifically sound sampling to verify the votes were counted correctly.
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20080720/NEWS/807200325/1002/news01&title=State_law_does_not_allow_for_precise_recount_
State law does not allow for precise recount
July 19, 2008
TALLAHASSEE - With the ghosts of the 2000 presidential election still haunting the state, Gov. Charlie Crist pushed lawmakers last year to require all voting machines to leave a "paper trail" that would lay to rest concerns about votes being accurately counted.
"If there's a need for a recount, I think it's important that we have something to recount," Crist said as the state junked touch-screen voting machines that did not leave paper records of individual votes.
But as the state heads into what is expected to be a record-setting year for voter turnout, Florida law does not allow for every ballot to be counted in case of a close election.
"There is not such a thing as a manual recount in Florida," said Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning. "It is very dangerous to tell candidates that, yes, the law has a section that says 'manual recount' but we're not going to look at those ballots."
The reason: Despite pleas from Browning, lawmakers have not authorized a full manual recount of all ballots in close elections.
Instead, canvassing boards in each of Florida's 67 counties will only manually count the ballots that were untabulated by machines reading the marked-in bubbles or connected lines.
<snip>
But some elections officials say there is not enough time to do a full manual recount in large counties like Miami-Dade, where more than 770,000 voters went to the polls in the 2004 presidential election. State law only allows 14 days after the election to certify the results.
And they say authorizing a full manual recount is akin to admitting a lack of faith in optical-scan voting machines that have cost tens of millions of dollars to buy and test in the past 18 months.
"We get them and immediately turn around and say, 'If we have a close election, we don't trust those machines,' " said Ron Labasky, a longtime attorney for the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. "If you felt that way, then you better count everything by hand."
Not all elections supervisors agree. Leon County elections supervisor Ion Sancho led the push for ridding the state of touch-screen voting when he publicly showed how results could be altered with no detection.
He said voters are "stunned" when told there will be no manual recount of all ballots in a close election.
"We have failed our citizens," said Sancho, arguing that lawmakers should allow more time for a full manual recount in close elections or at least a scientifically sound sampling to verify the votes were counted correctly.
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20080720/NEWS/807200325/1002/news01&title=State_law_does_not_allow_for_precise_recount_