Florida leads

After being the punch line of an election that turned the world’s premier democracy into a worldwide joke, it seems absurd to suggest that Florida should be emulated in any way when it comes to voting. Yet just six months after an embarrassment in which nearly all states should share blame, Florida now stands as the only one to enact comprehensive electoral reform.

Florida lawmakers last week passed a $32 million package that will, of course, do away with the punch card ballots that led to the infamous chad problems. Gone, too, will be hand-counted paper ballots and antiquated lever-action machines, all to be replaced by highly accurate optical scan machines with paper-ballot backups. And Florida’s not fooling around, either – the entire transition in every last precinct will be completed by the 2002 primary. In addition to adopting one standard of voting technology for the entire state, the package also puts $6 million in voter and poll-worker education and $2 million into creating a statewide voter database.

But dimpled chads, overcounts and undercounts were only part of the problem, the part that can be written off as the unintended consequences of trying to run a close election on equipment designed only to approximate. The other part – arbitrary decisions on when and how to conduct recounts and instance after instance of improperly purged voter lists – carried the stench of partisan politics into the polling place. The bill cleans it up by setting clear guidelines for machine and manual recounts and, perhaps most important as matter of public trust, it allows provisional ballots for voters who believe they have been removed improperly from the voter list, leaving for later the argument over the validity of those ballots.

Of course, Florida legislators did not pass the bill by a combined House and Senate score of 158-2 and Gov. Jeb Bush isn’t saying he’d crawl over hot coals to sign it simply because Florida politicians suddenly got religion. They know Florida voters are furious about what happened in November and will take out that fury on anyone who doesn’t work to fix it.

It was unfortunate then that the high-profile problems in Florida distracted attention from the problems elsewhere of improperly purged voter rolls, problems made ugly by the fact that the purging seemed concentrated in minority and low-income neighborhoods. In cities such as St. Louis and Chicago, thousands of citizens were prevented from voting. In Portland, it was hundreds (and worse, it happened for the third election in a row). In Brunswick, students allege there was a distinct connection between being purged and living in a Bowdoin College dorm.

Yet nowhere outside of Florida is there a concerted effort to improve the accuracy and fairness of elections. Georgia lawmakers passed a reform bill but didn’t put any money into it. Maryland created a committee to study the problem. Maine has done nothing.

Congress opened its session in January with post-election reform fervor for a modest $387 million proposal by the National Association of Secretaries of State to begin a phased-in national voting technology and elections procedure upgrade, but now suddenly can’t find the money amid the multi-trillion surplus. And you thought Florida being a leader in clean elections was absurd.