You wouldn't normally find me attempting to compose a diary. You wouldn't normally find me giving thanks to a Republican. Yesterday, I would NOT have had anything positive to say about voting in Florida.
But today brings positive news to all Floridians.
Perhaps instead of being known for hanging chads, butterfly ballots, voter purges and other methods of denying voters their right to have their vote count, we can be proud to say, PAPER TRAILS are here again.
Let ALL the votes be counted, and RECOUNTED!
Thank you Charlie!
In a historic vote, the Florida House today unanimously passed CS/HB 537, already passed in the Senate, that provides almost all voters paper ballots in time for the 2008 Presidential election, and bans paperless DREs outright by 2012. The bill now goes to the Governor where he’s sure to sign it since it’s his initiative.
No half-steps, no DREs with a useless paper trail as allowed by the deeply flawed Holt bill.
The Florida bill also contains new audit provisions essential to the security of paper ballot voting systems. There was agreement among legislators that the new audit provisions will need further tweaking next year before becoming effective in July 2008. For now, the language requires that after every election, at least 1% and not more than 2% of randomly selected precincts be audited by hand-counting the paper ballots in one randomly selected race. The audit will take place after certification and be reported 3 days before the contest period ends.
This all happened today because the Feds(EAC) backed off on and allowed HAVA funds to be used for the change.
Gov. Charlie Crist, who asked the Legislature to switch the state to paper ballots, had initially planned to use state money for the new machines, but his plan was rejected by House Republicans.
Florida has had such a bad reputation from past voting screw-ups that this reform has made the news from Europe(Bulgaria no less) to Down Under.