Oddball Update

During the infamous 2000 general election, Florida — in particular Palm Beach County — took the national spotlight, and phrases like “voter irregularities” and “hanging chads” became part of the American lexicon. After Florida election committees and voting citizens alike were embarrassed (and rightfully so) for their alarming incompetence and ineptitude, the state government quickly outlawed those ballots.

Faced with the need to overhaul their voting systems, many Florida counties, including the one where I live, invested millions of dollars in electronic touch-screen voting machines. We used these high-tech devices during several elections. Personally, I thought they were great. You cast your vote, then you’re shown a summary screen that shows you who you voted for, so that you can visually confirm that the machine recorded your intentions accurately. When you’re done, you push the big, red, blinking “VOTE” button and walk away.

But Florida had not escaped its own self-made election hell. Instead, it had merely descended one more circle into the deepening inferno. In Sarasota county, fresh “voter irregularities” were discovered with the touch-screen hardware. The county’s touch-screen devices apparently malfunctioned in such a way that they did not register many touches on the screen. In a congressional race, it was determined that 17,000 voters mysteriously had not chosen either candidate — and the winner of the race captured the title with a 368-vote margin. This set off a bunch of alarm bells. Clearly, a lot of voters simply did not pay attention to the review screens — which correctly indicated that no vote had been cast — proving that if you try to make something idiot-proof, nature will simply design a better idiot. But that is no excuse for the abysmal failure of the county’s hardware, which has but one function — one that that it failed to carry out properly.

After the Sarasota incident, members of the Florida state government once again became concerned that their names would be illuminated in the national hall of shame if they didn’t get things under control. So another statewide decree was laid down, banning the use of touch-screen voting machines. So far, Florida’s record was 0-for-2.

Then came the ballot scanning machines.

After the exit of the touch-screen voting machines, a new hybrid paper/electronic system was ushered into Florida’s election halls. Similar to those Scantron tests you took back in school, our new system involves handing the voter a paper ballot and asking them to fill in the circle next to their candidates of choice. Afterwards, the voter takes their completed ballot and feeds it into a scanning machine — which looks like a paper shredder, ironically enough — while a poll worker stands by to make sure everything is OK. The scanner will immediately report whether your ballot was accepted, or if there was some problem that rendered it unreadable. If the ballot was unreadable, the machine spits it back out right away, and you can get another ballot and try again. Similar to the touch-screen’s “summary page,” this was enacted as a measure of idiot-proofing. I voted this way during a recent primary, and it works fine — although I prefer the touch-screen system, to be honest.

After all this trial and error, you’d think that Florida would have finally solved the problems with their election system. Well, you’d be wrong. Quoth a news blurb from this week:

A month of primary recounts in the election battleground of Palm Beach County, Florida, has twice flipped the winner in a local judicial race and revealed grave problems in the county’s election infrastructure, including thousands of misplaced ballots and vote tabulation machines that are literally unable to produce the same results twice.

Wired.com

So now it appears that the ballot scanning hardware operates inconsistently, to the point where you can feed it the same ballot multiple times and it may not give you the same result each time — alternatively rejecting it on some scans, and accepting it on others. This is a serious problem. If your ballot gets accepted on the day you vote, and a recount becomes necessary due to a very close result, your perfectly valid ballot may be rejected on a future scan.

Can hardware like this ever be made 100% reliable? Probably not, but you would think that something as important as a general election in the United States of America would demand use of the most high-quality voting equipment available on planet Earth. Unfortunately, since individual counties procure their voting hardware at their own expense, there is often not a lot of money to be thrown around for military- or aircraft-grade reliability and the massive cost markups, reasonable or otherwise, that are associated with such. The millions of dollars in loans taken out on the touch-screen hardware, for example, have essentially become debts that counties can no longer recoup, since the hardware can no longer be used and most likely cannot be sold for an equal value (due to its being proven defective).

Our system of voting is just another line-item on a long, ever-growing list of systems, services and infrastructures in the United States that are failing, grinding to a halt or have already collapsed. A long list of problems that we’ve collectively ignored for, in some cases, decades upon decades. A list that, now that it’s reached critical mass, we don’t have the money to deal with because we’re in the midst of the worst economic crisis we’ve seen in nigh on a century. And why are we in that crisis? Because we spent all of our money — at the federal, state, and individual level — not on solving society’s problems, but on kneejerk wars and security efforts, pet projects for special interest groups and bullshit bling.

So in the meantime, I’ll go to the polls and cast my vote for whichever candidates I think are less likely to abuse their office, ignore their constituents and make things worse, knowing that the nature of American government means that such a candidate many not even exist in many of the races before us. And if a recount becomes necessary, it’s my hope not only that my ballot will count the same way as it did when I cast it, but also that some definitive result can be reached quickly and to the satisfaction of all involved. At this juncture in our history, where the American populace has become so fractious and divided against itself, we need consensus. A decisive result, a way forward without the self-doubt and the endless, self-serving litigation.

But we need to arrive at that consensus ourselves. We need to put our future ahead of our present…just for once.

Tagged as Florida, politics, voting + Categorized as Headlines, Rants