January 08, 2004
This is disturbing. Predictable and expected, but very disturbing. Because you know who is going to run with this. You can already hear the paper flying through the presses. The media will play this story for 10 months, and then some:
Three years after helping render punch-card voting systems obsolete, Broward County voters have proven that no election system is foolproof.
What this proves to me is that fools should not be voting.
In Tuesday's special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate.
And there is a problem with this? The people were not capable of casting a vote and thus failed to vote. Think about it. These are people who are unable to push a stylus through a punchcard. Does anyone believe they can successfully vote via touchscreen?
How so many happened to cast nonvotes remains a riddle. Unlike with punch cards or paper ballots, there's no paper record with electronic voting that might offer a clue to the voter's intent.
And this is a bad thing? What this means is that it is no longer possible for a panel of (partisan) individuals to examine individual ballots and try to deduce the intent of the voter. This is done by carefully examining any marks or dents on the ballot (be they intentional or not) and also by ignoring the fact that it is quite possible that the voter intentionally non-voted for any particular race.
The percentage of nonvotes -- 1.3 percent -- is modest compared to the days of ''hanging'' and ''pregnant chads.'' But in Tuesday's race, every vote was crucial. In a seven-candidate field, Ellyn Bogdanoff beat Oliver Parker by just 12 votes.
So, the real story is that although there are still some people who insist on voting improperly (or intentionally non-voting), it is better than it was before. Sounds like improvement to me.
''These were the new machines,'' said Chas Brady, a spokesman for Parker's campaign. ``This was not supposed to happen.''
Why the surprise, Chas? (Sorry, almost called you Chad on accident!) Is it really unexpected that these people who used punch card voting for election after election and never did figure it out might not be able to vote properly on an unfamiliar high-tech system?
Bogdanoff had a ready explanation for the mystery. She theorized that some of the people who cast nonvotes were among the county's true-blue Democrats who were appalled to find a ballot with only Republicans.
Is she saying that because she won (by 12 votes) or because she is really confident that these were selective non-voters and not morons? Either way, she still wins. Unless the interpreters get involved again and decide who these 134 people actually meant to vote for.
''That would make a heck of a lot of sense if you were looking for a Democrat on the ballot,'' she said.
Although this appears to be merely a minor glitch in a very minor election, it is much more than that. It is really a test-run for November 2004. It's going to be ugly in Florida, folks.
