What’s going on with Florida?
Chads are gone but failures continue
A dozen years after the 2000 presidential vote-count debacle, the nation again was left waiting for Florida on election night. And the day after.
Unlike the hanging chads that turned the Bush- Gore race into a tortuous legal tangle that went to the Supreme Court, this time the whole world isn’t watching. Florida turned out to be non-essential — President Obama was able to build an Electoral College majority without it.
But for the people of South Florida, some of whom waited as long as seven hours in line, another ballot meltdown is frustratingly familiar.
Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-CalTech voting technology project, says the problems are like the old computer joke about troublesome software: “It’s not a bug— it’s a feature.”
Florida, Stewart says, has modernized its voting systems, but they remain plagued by poor management, lack of capacity and systemic dysfunction. They work in most counties but fail in the biggest ones where the population is large and diverse.
The failures are more human than technical, he says. Florida’s elections are run by supervisors who are, in most cases, elected officials rather than non-partisan professionals.
“Supervisors continue to be highly autonomous ... and with some important exceptions are more political operatives than they are professional managers,” says Stewart, who grew up in Orlando.
“There’s no hanging chads or butterfly ballots, but there’s still a question mark looming over the map of Florida,” says Kendall Coffey, a Florida attorney who represented Al Gore during the 2000 recount battle.
Suzy Trutie, spokeswoman for Miami-Dade County, blames the number of voters and a 10-page ballot. The county saw more than 405,000 voters show up on Election Day. Another 237,000 used early balloting. She says election workers spent Wednesday trying to verify and count 210,000 absentee ballots.
Trutie also blames voters, saying some took as long as 40 minutes to complete the ballot. “The reason we had long lines ... was the length of the ballot and how long it took each person to fill out the ballot,” she says.
Republican Rep. Allen West, a Tea Party favorite, charged “disturbing irregularities” and asked a judge to seize ballots and voting machines. He was trailing Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy by less than 1%.
Stewart says other places, such as Southern California, have larger populations and more languages. He says Florida needs to professionalize its elections management, increase access to polling places, adopt best practices used elsewhere and expand absentee and early voting.