Computer repair jacksonville florida

To understand the fiasco now developing in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model. Let us begin with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, the acting elections supervisor of Duval County.

"Some voters are strange," Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain why, in the last presidential election, 5,000 Duvalians trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for president. Carlberg did concede that after he ran these punch cards through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched holes shook loose, gaining Al Gore approximately 160 votes and Bush roughly 80.

"So, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd have a different president," I noted. Carlberg, a Republican, answered with a grin.

This had been true throughout the state--in certain precincts, at least. In Jacksonville, for example, in Duval precincts 7 through 10, nearly one in five ballots, or 11,200 votes in all, went uncounted in 2000, rejected as either an "under-vote" (a blank ballot) or an "over-vote" (a ballot with extra markings). In those precincts, 72 percent of the residents are African American; ballots that did make the count went four to one for Al Gore. All in all, a staggering 179,855 votes were "spoiled"--i.e., cast but not counted--in the last presidential election in Florida. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission matched the ballots with census statistics and estimated that 54 percent of all the under- and over-voted ballots had been cast by blacks, for whom the likelihood of having a vote discarded exceeded that of a white voter by 800 percent.

Now, four years later, Florida remains the big electoral prize. The fight card, too, is much the same. In one corner we have the first brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and his talented and inventive ballot-counting team--including his new, hand-picked secretary of state, Glenda Hood, and Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections, famed begetter of the butterfly ballot. In the Democrats' corner is political pugilist Corinne Brown, the congresswoman who in July had the rare honor of having her description of the last election, "the U.S. coup d'etat," purged from the Congressional Record. Brown, along with the rest of the Congressional Black Caucus, is begging her party to preempt the vote-bending machinery that is, she fears, already at work in Florida. Behind her--far behind--is her party leadership, which instead has settled on a very Democratic response: when I asked a Democratic spokesman in Florida how his party was preparing for a new vote-count fight, he said that a "team of lawyers" was standing by for Election Day. But by then, the ballot-snatching game could already be lost, in a state where the tally is likely once again to turn on how the votes are counted rather than for whom they're cast.

Vote spoilage is, at root, a typical class problem. Just as poor and minority districts wind up with shoddy schools and shoddy hospitals, they get stuck with shoddy ballot machines. In Gadsden, the only black-majority county in Florida, one in eight votes spoiled in 2000, the worst countywide record in the state. Next door in Leon County (Tallahassee), which used the same paper ballot, the mostly white, wealthier county lost almost no votes. The difference was that in mostly white Leon, each voting booth was equipped with its own optical scanner, with which voters could check their own ballots. In the black county, absent such "second chance" equipment, any error would void a vote.

The best solution for vote spoilage, whether from blank ballots or from hanging chads, is Leon County's system: paper ballots, together with scanners in the voting booths. In fact, this is precisely what Governor Bush's own experts recommended in 2001 for the entire state. The Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, appointed by the governor to soothe public distrust after the 2000 race, chose paper ballots with scanners over the trendier option--the touchscreen computer. Although the computer rigs cost eight times as much to implement as do paper ballots with scanners, the touch screens result in many more spoiled votes. In this year's Florida presidential primary, the computers had a spoilage rate of more than 1 percent, as compared to one-tenth of a percent for the double-checked paper ballots.

Apparently some Bush boosters were not keen on a fix so inexpensive and effective. Sandra Mortham, in particular, successfully lobbied on behalf of the Florida Association of Counties to stop the state legislature from blocking the purchase of touchscreen voting systems. Mortham, coincidentally, was also a paid lobbyist for Election Systems & Software, a computer voting-machine manufacturer. Fifteen of Florida's sixty-seven counties chose the pricey computers, twelve of them ordered from ES&S, which, in turn, paid Mortham's county association a percentage on the sales.

Florida's computerization had its first mass test in 2002, in Broward County. The ES&S machines appeared to work well in some white Fort Lauderdale precincts, but in black communities, such as Lauderhill trod Pompano Beach, there was wholesale disaster. Poll workers were untrained, and many polling places opened late; machines locked up or broke down. Black voters were held up in lines for hours. No one doubts that hundreds of black votes were lost before they were cast. Broward county commissioners had purchased the touch-screen machines from ES&S over the objection of elections supervisor Miriam Oliphant; notably, one commissioner's campaign treasurer was an ES&S lobbyist. Governor Bush responded to the Broward fiasco by firing Oliphant for "misfeasance."

Based on the measured differential in vote loss between paper and computer systems, the fifteen counties in Florida using touch-screen systems can expect to lose at least 29,000 votes to spoilage on Election Day--some 27,000 more than if the counties were to use paper ballots with scanners. Given the demographics of spoilage, this translates into a net lead of thousands for Bush before a single ballot is cast. The touchscreen systems, it should be noted, do not provide any paper receipts, violating a Florida law that requires manual recounts in close elections. In February, Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a flat declaring the fifteen touch-screen counties exempt from the law, but in August a state administrative judge attempted to block her order. As of publication, it remains unclear how the recount question will be resolved. (For more on unrecountable ballots, see "No Appeal," page 77.)

When the legacy of the 2000 "felon" purge is also taken into account, Bush's head start grows by thousands more votes. Florida law bars ex-felons from voting, but in advance of the 2000 election, the state expunged voters based on a list of 94,000 names, only 3 percent of which could later be verified as former convicts. (The list, when I obtained it in 2000, included 325 "felons" listed as having been convicted, improbably, in the future.) Earlier this year, when Secretary of State Hood quietly issued a new "felon" list of 47,000 names, she at first refused my request to see it. Eventually lawsuits forced her to divulge a portion of the list, which, like its predecessor, was found to contain errors by the thousands, including more criminals of the future. Hood withdrew the new list.

But the state has yet to repair the damage caused by the prior purge. So far, Hood has ordered the restoration of only 1,000 of the 94,000 Floridians purged using the original lists, and those only under pressure of court orders. Tens of thousands remain purged: for example, Willie Steen, a Gulf War veteran whose right to vote was stripped after he was apparently matched to a convict named William O'Steen. The state agrees that Steen is innocent, yet it has not required local officials to reinstate him. Those who attempt to get back their vote have been required, depending on the county, to seek clemency from Jeb Bush for crimes committed by others, or to provide fingerprints for investigation, or to undergo ad-hoc court-like proceedings to prove they are themselves and not some convict with a similar name.