Florida turning away from touch-screen voting / State's plan for '08 is paper ballots with scanner for counting

2007-02-02 04:00:00 PDT Delray Beach, Fla. -- Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida's largest counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida's move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic machines. If, as expected, the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation's biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Several counties around the country, including Cuyahoga in Ohio and Sarasota in Florida, are moving toward exchanging touch-screen machines for ones that provide a paper trail. But Florida could become the first state that invested heavily in the recent rush to touch screens to reject them so sweepingly.

"Florida is like a synonym for election problems. It's the Bermuda Triangle of elections," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrust USA, a nonprofit group that has advocated optical scanners as more reliable than touch screens. "For Florida to be clearly contemplating moving away from touch screens to the greatest extent possible is truly significant."

Other states that rushed to buy the touch-screen machines are also abandoning them. Earlier this week, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would phase out the machines as they wear out, and replace them with optical scanners. The Maryland Legislature also seems determined to order a switch from the paperless touch screens, though it is not clear yet whether it will require the use of optical scanners or just allow paper printers to be added to the touch screens.

On Monday, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., plans to introduce a bill in Congress that will require all voting machines nationwide to produce paper records through which voters can verify that their ballots were recorded correctly.

Crist, a Republican, at times drew whoops and applause when he announced his plan at the South County Civic Center in Palm Beach County, the epicenter of the 2000 election standoff and home of the infamous "butterfly ballot" that confused many voters. The touch screens had replaced the punch-card systems that caused widespread problems that year.

"You should, when you go vote, be able to have a record of it," Crist told a few hundred mostly older citizens at the civic center in Delray Beach, where many residents accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan in 2000 instead of Al Gore because of the confusing ballot design. "That's all we're proposing today. It's not very complicated; it is in fact common sense. Most importantly, it is the right thing to do."