subject: Florida heads into e-voting storm
posted: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 10:49:06 +0100


[Strange! Bush's war records were also irrecoverably lost! What an
amazing co-incidence! And, Florida is where Bush's brother is gov!
Another co-incidence! Indeed - a co-incidental co-incidence! Thta's
really pushing it. Now, if only I believed in co-incidence I'd be
shocked. - Stu]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/31/florida_evote_recount/

Florida heads into e-voting storm
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Tuesday 31st August 2004 13:04 GMT

Florida's election officials have been accused of taking a step back
in electoral procedure after it emerged that they will not require
recounts of votes cast on electronic voting machines, despite an
administrative judge's ruling to the contrary on Friday last week.

Judge Susan Kirkland ruled that the normal state regulations apply to
voting machines as well as paper ballots, Wired reports, and
officials have yet to appeal the decision. The rules state that if an
election is won by a margin of less than a quarter of one per cent of
the total voter turnout, the votes must be retabulated.

Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, told
Wired: "The whole reason that touch-screen machines were put into
place and that some of the counties chose to use them was to avoid
the problems they encountered in 2000. This is a step backward to
that time."

Kirkland's announcement follows an earlier ruling from Glenda Hood,
Florida's Secretary of State, that recounts of ballots cast on voting
machines would be unnecessary, because the recount would not change
the result.

Kirkland said that the legislature had an opportunity to clarify
their position when they voted on the issue earlier this year. She
wrote: "If the legislature had intended that no manual recounts be
done in counties using voting systems which did not use paper
ballots, it could easily have done so; it did not."

Electronic voting machines have been heavily promoted in the US as a
solution to the problems officials had recounting votes after the
2000 election, but there are serious concerns over how to audit the
votes, and also over the machines' reliability.

California recently recertified voting machines in 11 of the state's
counties after they were modified to provide voters with a paper
receipt, and in Florida, a server crash reportedly erased all records
of the Miami-Dade county elections. "We will never know how good or
bad the audit capability because the data is gone," Lida Rodriguez-
Taseff, an attorney and chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform
Coalition said at the time.

State officials have 30 days to appeal Kirkland's ruling. ®

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