Ah, Florida! Even if you don’t live here, think 2000, 2004, 2006 to know how Florida can tilt the results.
The meltdown starts here. Florida is solving its election woes by dumping its touch screens for another batch of ES&S voting machines (Election Systems & Software). Same vendor, different playstation. For certain ES&S promised they’d do it right this time. And we believe them. So, Florida is trading in the touch screens that publicly lost 18,000 votes in Sarasota for ES&S optical ballot scanners, another independent stand-alone internal vote counting machine.
We’ll have a paper trail. So what’s the problem? Aside from the fact that it’s a bad business decision to throw tons of money at a company that failed to provide a solid product in the first place, this time when these new independent vote counting machines tally up their votes and pass them up to the mother tabulation computer, we the voter will never know how many votes are crumpled, lost, miscounted... or flipped. The exit polls can’t help. Neither will current election laws.
And it’s all on Florida. Whether you vote your issues or your favorite color, look south. Because come 2008, no matter what your team color is red, white, blue, or puce - your vote could be trashed.
Lani Massey Brown, MARGIN OF ERROR: BALLOTS OF STRAW. When Florida’s governor infiltrates America’s voting machines, only one woman can stop him – one woman and the man sent to spy on her.
BALLOTS OF STRAW is honored to be featured on VotersUnite.Org, a non-partisan national grassroots resource for fair and accurate elections.
Reference: Amy Sherman’s article in Miami Herald announcing Florida’s move to optical scanners, 10/10/07.