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Ballot Audits Don't Get A Vote Of Confidence
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Published: June 15, 2008
Updated: 06/15/2008 12:14 am
TALLAHASSEE - What's the use of paper ballots if no one looks at them?
That's the question that election watchdogs continue to press, even as the state's election supervisors race to implement the 2007 election law requiring every Florida county to vote on paper ballots.
Kindra Muntz of Sarasota was among the activists who cheered last spring as Gov. Charlie Crist signed the paper-trail legislation. She also warned, however, that the job would remain half-finished until the state beefed up its standards for auditing ballots by hand after elections to ensure against tampering and foul-ups. It's a safeguard that Florida still lacks.
"A paper trail is one thing, but paper alone is not the answer," Muntz, president of the Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections, said last week. "We're not looking for something to wallpaper our walls with."
Even Secretary of State Kurt Browning wants to strengthen the post-election audit law. But changes proposed by House and Senate Democrats went nowhere this spring, leaving activists frustrated and fearful that, with a presidential election looming, Florida's election system remains vulnerable to disaster.
At issue is not whether to audit paper ballots by hand, but which ones to check, how many and when.
The 2007 paper-trail legislation includes a new audit provision requiring counties to conduct manual, public audits of votes cast in one randomly selected race, in at least 1 percent of the voting precincts, but no more than 2 percent. The audits are to take place after certification of the results, leaving court action as the sole remedy available to candidates and voters if an audit turns up problems.
Audits And Recounts
Although not the toughest standard among the states, it nonetheless put Florida once again at the forefront of election reform. According to the Verified Voting Foundation, only 18 states have any post-election audit requirement for their paper ballots; 13 require a paper trail only, and 19 require neither paper ballots nor audits.
Critics arguing that Florida's 1 percent auditing standard is inadequate, however, say that it was set arbitrarily, with no science behind it. Browning says they are right.
Browning stressed, however, that the purpose of auditing is to confirm whether voting machines functioned correctly - not to determine winners and losers in close races. That's the purview of recounts, though "we no more manually recount any ballot in Florida than I'm an astronaut," he said, criticizing the current law for authorizing only manual recounts of undervotes and overvotes, where either a vote was not registered or too many votes were registered in a race.
Browning said he wants lawmakers next year to authorize full manual recounts in races where the margin is one-quarter of 1 percent, the same standard that now triggers manual counting of overvotes and undervotes.
He wants to improve the post-election audit law, too - though he is busy fighting efforts by one county's voters to bolster audit requirements for their own precincts.
In November 2006, Sarasota County voters adopted a charter amendment proposed by the Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections, headed by Muntz. Among other things, the proposal requires post-election audits of 5 percent of voting precincts prior to election certification.
Muntz said her group chose the 5 percent standard based on input from election watchdogs such as the Verified Voters Foundation and technical experts such as Rebecca Mercuri, a software security engineer who has testified before Congress about voting machine standards.
By coincidence, the charter amendment appeared on the same ballot as the congressional contest between Christine Jennings and Rep. Vern Buchanan, in which more than 18,000 ballots cast lacked a vote in that race. A congressional investigation did not end until early this year, when testing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that Sarasota's voting machines had functioned properly.
After the 2006 election, Browning and Sarasota Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent filed suit to throw out the charter amendment - not because they object to more auditing, but because the Sarasota rule would conflict with state election laws and create a "lack of uniformity" among the counties.
Muntz's group counters that election procedures fall under the county's jurisdiction through home rule, and that given the varying machines and vendors used by the counties, little uniformity exists. Her group prevailed initially in circuit court; Browning and Dent won on appeal. The two sides now await a ruling from the state Supreme Court, which heard their arguments last month.
Although voting reform activists generally agree on having more post-election auditing, they don't necessarily agree on how to do it.
This spring, the Florida Voters Coalition pushed for a state model that would audit a portion of ballots determined by variables such as the margin of victory in a race and number of votes cast. To date, only New Jersey has adopted such a standard.
The voters coalition worked in October with election officials and experts to devise a new standard for "statistically significant" auditing.
Every Which Way
Their initial proposal: audit all races for federal office and those for governor and lieutenant governor, Cabinet offices and the Legislature, plus two more statewide elections. The number of ballots audited would depend on several factors, including the number cast in that race and the margin of victory; the tighter the race, the more votes checked.
Browning faulted the proposal for being too expansive and complicated. In some years and counties, he said, such a law would require that as many as 14 races be audited.
But the advocates found Democratic sponsors for their idea: Rep. Tony Sasso of Cocoa Beach and Sen. Charlie Justice of St. Petersburg. They also eventually hit upon a compromise that Browning said he could accept: a 3 percent audit of three races, one of which would have to be the presidential race in the years for that election. The proposal would require completion by the seventh day after certification, before the end of the period in which a candidate can contest the results.
Pam Haengel, vice president of the Florida Voters Coalition who also heads the Voting Integrity Alliance of Tampa Bay, said supporters worked furiously over the Easter weekend to water down the legislation. But the bill went nowhere.
Lee Constantine, who leads the Senate's Ethics and Elections Committee, said he wanted to give county supervisors ample time to make the switch to paper ballots and to adjust to the 2007 audit requirement without dumping more big changes on them this spring.
"A post-election audit requirement of 1 percent to 2 percent - that's a dramatic change," said Lee Constantine, R-Altamonte Springs. "Now before we've even tested it, the advocates are already asking for more."
Sasso said budget pressures also made the bill a tough sell because the enhanced auditing requirements were thought to carry a hefty price tag.
Frustration With Complaints
He has not changed his mind about the need for more audits, saying that "making sure that all of our votes are counted should be a bipartisan concern." But with next year's budget pressures promising to be at least as difficult, Sasso said, it may be a while before lawmakers get on board. He said that even he might not be willing to support it in 2009.
"I don't know if I want to contribute to an economic problem that already exists," he said.
Browning and Constantine both expressed frustration with the constant stream of complaints from activists, which Browning criticized for "ripping voter confidence apart."
But Browning does think the 3 percent compromise he reached with advocates is a reasonable auditing standard. He may endorse that proposal or something like it, he said, and wants to make few technical changes made to the audit law as well.
For now, the state has a new audit requirement that is better than anything it had in past years, Browning said. Like Constantine, he said that adopting a tougher standard this spring could have proven chaotic for supervisors racing now to switch completely to paper ballots in time for the presidential election. Browning's own office is still finalizing the rule for implementing the 2007 audit standard, he said.
The pending election is exactly why lawmakers should have acted this spring, Haengel said.
"Voters don't realize that our current law doesn't give us the safeguards that having a paper trail implies," she said. "These machines are brand-new; they've not been tried before.
"Florida voters will be guinea pigs again this year, and the audit after the election is hardly going to mean anything."
Reporter Catherine Dolinski can be reached at (850) 222-8382.
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