Voting System Results Still Out
Five years after the vote-counting debacle in Florida suspended the election of a new U.S. president, California and other states are embroiled in a contentious debate over how voters should cast their ballots.
The maligned punch cards that snarled the 2000 count are all but gone. But with electronic machines under attack as unreliable and vulnerable to hackers, there is little consensus about what the new technology should look like.
That has left many counties nationwide in turmoil as they struggle with unproven technology while state regulations remain in flux and the federal government offers minimal guidance.
In some places, voters are facing their third balloting system in five years.
In California, counties have lurched from one voting system to another as the state has written and rewritten standards. Several counties are scrambling to redo their June election plans after the state's top elections official raised new questions last month about an electronic voting machine in use for years.
Miami officials talk of scrapping their 3-year-old electronic machines, while Mercer County, Pa., officials want to keep theirs but were ordered by state authorities to take them out of service after glitches during the 2004 presidential election.
"It pretty much left the county up a tree," said Tom Rookey, elections chief of the Steel Belt county on the Ohio border.
In Connecticut, the secretary of state is tussling with the federal government over how quickly the state must replace its decades-old lever-style voting machines with electronic machines.
Indiana's largest county has sued the company that sold it electronic voting machines. Across the border in Ohio, the same company has sued the state.
"It's been crazy," said San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas, who said he is returning to paper ballots because the state refused to recertify more than 10,000 electronic machines the county bought two years ago. "Everyone is in uncharted territory here."
The arcane world of voting technology and ballot counting once drew little attention from anyone other than elections officials.
But 2000 changed everything.
"Everyone looked at what was coming out of Florida -- scenes of judges squinting to look at ballots -- and agreed there had to be a better way to do this," said Doug Chapin, head of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project. "There was a real push toward computerized paperless machines to get away from these chads."
