RECOUNTING FLORIDA

It won’t decide the presidency or determine the majority in Congress, but the vote recount under way in Florida’s 13th Congressional District is worth watching closely for what it says about voting-machine technology and the public’s faith in the election process. Both are being tested now.

District 13 includes the area around the city of Sarasota, not far south of Tampa on the state’s Gulf Coast. The seat was open because the current member of Congress, Katherine Harris, ran an unsuccessful campaign for a Senate seat. Republican Vern Buchanan seemingly defeated Democrat Christine Jennings to replace Rep. Harris, but his 368-vote margin of victory was so small that it met the standard for a mandatory recount.

Two of the five counties that comprise the 13th District, Sarasota and Charlotte, use touch-screen voting machines; the other three use optical scanners. These are the two most popular types of voting machines in the nation, with optical scanners counting paper ballots being common in Maine but touch-screen machines present in about 40 percent of precincts nationwide. There is a huge difference between the two.

The Jennings campaign grew suspicious about vote totals after it noticed that more than 18,000 of the ballots in Sarasota County did not include a vote in the House race. And some voters believed that the touch-screen machines they used did not accurately reflect their votes. The problem is checking the voting trail to understand the extent of the problem and ensure votes are properly recorded. An audit of this system, which both records votes and tabulates them but doesn’t, unlike a scanning system, include a paper ballot, makes this difficult.

Since 2000, critics of inadequate voting technology have warned that voters will grow cynical at a voting process that cannot be trusted when races are especially close. For now, perhaps, voters are determined to exercise their right while they keep close watch on the operation of the voting machines, but the sense in Florida, reflected in headlines such as the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s “How did we end up here again?” show a weariness with the problem that should have been fixed by now.

The nature of the problem, if indeed there was one and the massive undervoting wasn’t just indifference by the electorate, has yet to be determined. But of the four broad ways voters can be disenfranchised – voter misidentification, faulty voter rolls, miscounted ballots and balky machines – mechanical problems should be the easiest to anticipate.

If the local government can’t do that, the other three problems become more difficult. And that government has much less chance of persuading voters that their ballots matter.