Voting Issues Continue to Plague Florida, Anger Democrats

When the 2000 presidential election cast a harsh glare of public attention on Florida's voting system, it revealed a patchwork of old ballot machines, confusing and sometimes conflicting laws and voter dissatisfaction.

The ensuing chaos resulted in a month of recounts and legal challenges that focused on disputed "hanging" and "pregnant" chads as well as state versus county recounts. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court ended county recounts and the state, and the presidency, went to Gov. George W. Bush.

While the state government has had four years to correct the election problems of 2000, Florida Democrats gathered in Boston for their party's national convention are still skeptical about Florida's voting system.

"We need to make sure that we don't have a repeat of the last election," said Congresswoman Corrine Brown, whose district spans from Jacksonville to Orlando. "In Florida, the devil is always in the details."

Brown and a number of other Democrats, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have called for international monitors to attend the Florida elections this November.

"I just think we need help," Brown said in an interview Tuesday. "We have got to make sure that our election is transparent. I've gone around the world monitoring other people's elections."

Shaking her head, she added, "In my district in Jacksonville, 27,000 votes were thrown out -- thrown out."

Brown is not alone in her frustration. Judging from delegates to this week's convention, there is still a pervasive feeling among Democrats that they were robbed of the White House in 2000.

At a breakfast on Tuesday, the Reverend Jesse Jackson told cheering and laughing Florida delegates, "We should put yellow tape around the whole state of Florida -- say that this is a crime scene, let nothing out and nothing in."

In an interview Rev. Jackson said, "I met with Bush on Friday and asked him about one issue: Would every vote count? He could not say yes. He said Karl Rove would get back to me. It should not be hard to say that every vote counts."

Brown also blames Republicans for Florida's voting woes.

"You and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat," she said to GOP Congressional colleagues earlier this month. "You stole the election."

Recent events in Florida have added to the Democrats anger.

On Wednesday the New York Times reported that electronic records from the 2002 gubernatorial primary race between Janet Reno and Bill McBride were lost in two computer crashes last year.

The Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, discovered the loss when they requested all audit data from the election.

"This shows that unless we do something now -- or it may very well be too late -- Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," Linda Rodriguez-Taseff, the chairwoman of the coalition, told The New York Times Tuesday.

Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said Tuesday that backup procedures have been installed which would ensure that audit records remain intact through future computer crashes.

The new electronic touch screen voting machines installed to prevent the problems of 2000 from recurring have instead incited partisan debates and voter insecurity. They are exempt by state law from manual recounts, leaving no paper trail that would provide voters with a record.

This is a fact that leaves some election watchers uneasy.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in January against Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood and Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, claiming that votes are not verifiable without a paper trail.

Gov. Jeb Bush and Glenda Hood have resisted this assertion, saying that a manual recount would be unnecessary.

Democrats, however, remain skeptical.

"I think that in many ways [touch screens] will exacerbate problems," Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox said in Boston on Wednesday. "We no longer have a verifiable audit trail and I think that is a major problem."

But Florida GOP Chairman Carole Jean Jordan told the Online NewsHour that under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida "has the finest voting system in the U.S."

She said that Florida has spent "millions of dollars" and added "every possible thing that could be done [to ensure secure voting] has been done."

As Democrats and Republicans have debated problems with voting machines in 2000 and 2002 another controversy has arisen.

In mid-July, State officials acknowledged the existence of a controversial list that contained the names of felons barred from voting.

Secretary of State Hood had initially dismissed concerns by lawmakers and advocacy groups over the list and only released it after a judge's order.

Media organizations and advocacy groups who reviewed the list questioned why it contained the names of 22,000 African-Americans, who typically vote Democrat, and only 61 Hispanics, who typically vote Republican.

In November of 2000, Time Magazine reported that African-Americans accounted for 16 percent of the total vote in Florida, almost double the normal amount. State party leaders said they expect an even higher turnout in 2004 but are worried that the felon list and other problems may cause legitimate African American votes to go uncounted.

Hood has announced that two internal investigations, aimed at finding the source of possible errors in the list, are underway.

In a statement published by The Palm Beach Post earlier this week, Hood said "We are committed to ensuring successful elections in which every eligible voter can exercise his or her right to vote."

While State officials insist that the list has been thrown out, its existence has infuriated Democrats.

"The Civil Rights community is going to sue Florida concerning the felon list," said Congresswoman Brown on Wednesday. "Because when you say felon list, a large percentage of the people on that list were not felons in 2000 and are not felons now."

Former Attorney General Janet Reno, in an interview at a Florida delegation breakfast, suggested a major change to the way the state deals with felons who want to cast a vote.

"I think we must move to make sure our [felon] list is as accurate as possible. The best thing to do is for the Governor to recognize that Florida is behind the times," Reno said. "Florida is one of the very few states in the nation that excludes felons from the voting list after they've done their time and paid their debt to society."

Florida GOP Chairwoman Jordan said that the list in question was compiled several years ago and was inherited by current Secretary of State Hood.

The federal Civil Rights Commission has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the state of Florida knew about the alleged discrimination in the list, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Both Senator Kerry and President Bush have pledged to place teams of attorneys in Florida in preparation for the November election.

-- By Meghann Farnsworth, Online NewsHour