Honest Voting

A razor-thin margin in Palm Beach County’s August 26th election has forced a county-wide search for 2,500 ballots believed to have gone missing.

Mary Pat Flaherty writes for the Washington Post that after a recount last weekend, only 99,045 ballots were logged, though 102,523 ballots had been recorded by machine scanners on election night. (The Washington Post article, updated this evening, would seem to indicate that around 1,200 votes have been retrieved, since an earlier article in Computerworld magazine pegs the number of missing ballots higher, at 98,775 in and 3,748 not accounted for.) Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning brought legal and technical teams to West Palm Beach last Wednesday to suss out what might have gone wrong.

Today the county ran all the available ballots through high speed scanners to crosscheck results of its hand counts. County workers were sent to comb through polling places to see if packets of ballots had been left behind, and election workers counted the voter signatures from logs.

Palm Beach County has become a bellwether for the nation’s election-integrity problems. In 2000, Palm Beach County became notorious for its ”butterfly ballot.” When the county moved to touchscreen machines for the 2004 elections, other problems arose.  This year Palm Beach County chose optical scanners to maintain a paper trail for its ballots.  It’ll be interesting to see whether the rest of the nation gets to learn again from the Florida county’s problems.

Princeton professor Andrew W. Appel says that the state’s electronic voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems continue to be vulnerable to simple lockpicking, not just electronic interference, writes John Froonjian, political editor for The Press of Atlantic City.   Appel is serving as an expert witness in a lawsuit aimed at banning the use of 10,000 electronic voting machines in the state.  In addition to being vulnerable to physical and electronic break-ins, say activists, the machines don’t produce a paper backup.