Rumor has it that Florida governor Charlie Crist will announce tomorrow that his state plans to scrap tens of millions of dollars worth of touchscreen voting equipment and move to a system based completely on optical scan ballots. The Miami Herald claims that the total tab for overhauling the state's electoral system could be as high as $35 million.

If it turns out that Florida does ditch the touchscreens and go back to a solution with a better paper trail, then the state will be following the lead of counties across the country, including Ohio's Cuyahoga County and Florida's own Sarasota County. However, to my knowledge, Florida will be the first state to outlaw touchscreens on a statewide basis.

Speaking of Cuyahoga County, home of notorious levels of touchscreen-related trouble in both the primaries and the May 7 general elections last year, two election officials have been convicted of rigging a recount of ballots cast in the May 2004 presidential election. Here's a bit of background on the convictions and a short recap of what happened.

The Green and Libertarian presidential candidates have been involved in ongoing efforts to get a recount of the 2004 Ohio presidential vote. Ohio's election rules for a recount mandate that 3% of the precincts be recounted by hand, and if the results from this initial recount match up with the election night totals, then the rest of the county's precincts can be recounted by machine. However, if the results of the initial manual recount don't match up, then the entire county has to be recounted by hand.

Now, the important thing to note about this 3% recount is that the precincts included in it must be randomly selected. Otherwise, elections officials who don't want to risk the cost and labor of manually recounting millions of ballots could just select precincts where they suspect (or in some cases, know for certain) that the manual recount will come out right. This is what elections officials in Cuyahoga County pulled, and it's why two of them may be going to jail.

Cuyahoga County officials spent three days behind closed doors doing an illegal "pre-count" so that they could identify which precincts would produce correct results, thereby allowing them to do the rest of the recount by machine. Then, they delivered stacks of these pre-counted ballots to the official recount team, who then went through (by now pointless) theatrics of manually recounting the (already counted) ballots.

The reason that the Cuyahoga folks got busted was that there was someone at the official recount with a video camera, and this person videotaped election workers Jacqueline Maiden and Kathleen Dreamer dropping off boxes of ballots for the recount that were pre-sorted into "Bush" and "Kerry" stacks. When they were asked why these supposedly randomly selected ballots were already sorted into neat piles, the workers responded on camera to the effect that the 3% sample was not in fact random, but had been carefully selected so that it would product the correct results.

It's because of this videotaped evidence that these two workers were convicted. Blackbox Voting reports that their supervisors—the folks ultimately responsible for this farce—got off scot-free, as did elections officials in other counties where this was done but no one was dumb enough to admit to it on camera.