Boulevard

Paper Trail Vote Fix

Here’s a story that is perhaps the most important story affecting the political landscape today: the counting of the votes. This story ran on the front page of The Palm Beach Post newsprint edition; however, I had to search to find this in the online edition. Humm.

Bottom line: unless we fix the way the votes are counted, as well as not counted, we’ll lose our democracy. It would be ironically appropriate for the fix of the fix to come from the place where the fix was put in: Palm Beach County. Remember Teresa LaPore, Election Commissioner? In 2004 she was voted out of that job, which she had held for decades. I worked on the campaign that defeated her and installed her successor, former F.A.U. professor Arthur Anderson.

- J. Boulevard

Wexler seeks high court's aid in paper trail battle
By George Bennett

Palm Beach Post, Saturday, July 01, 2006

After suffering a string of losses in his 2 1/2 -year legal fight against paperless electronic voting, U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler wants help from an unlikely source: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Bush vs. Gore decision that Wexler and other Democrats decried in 2000.
Wexler's pro bono legal team plans to file a petition this summer asking the high court to consider his claim that voters who cast intangible electronic ballots are being denied the protections afforded voters who mark paper ballots that can be manually recounted.
Wexler points to Bush vs. Gore, in which the Supreme Court determined that inconsistent recount standards among Florida's 67 counties violated the equal-protection rights of voters. The state's different procedures for recounting electronic and paper ballots create a similar violation, Wexler contends.
Federal courts have disagreed.
U.S. District Judge James Cohn rejected Wexler's arguments following a three-day trial in 2004. After Wexler appealed, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld Cohn's ruling June 20.
Aside from contending the lower courts erred, Wexler says the 11th Circuit ruling conflicts with an April ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in an Ohio voting case that also centered on equal-protection issues.
"We have two federal appellate courts that disagree," Wexler attorney Jeffrey Liggio says. "I think the constitutional stage is set for the U.S. Supreme Court."
But an attorney who represented the prevailing side in the Ohio case says the rulings by the two appellate courts are consistent and the Supreme Court should deny Wexler's petition.
"I think Wexler is dead wrong," says Dan Tokaji, a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law who argued before the 6th Circuit.
In both the Ohio case and the Wexler case, Tokaji says, the courts focused on whether voters using different systems had a similar "likelihood of casting effective votes."
Tokaji represented Ohio voters who used punch cards and older types of optical-scan ballots in the 2002 election. Other Ohioans in the same election used more modern systems that notify voters when they have skipped a race or chosen too many candidates.
The plaintiffs presented statistics showing that ballots cast on the older systems were more likely to go uncounted than the ballots cast on the newer ones. The 6th Circuit, reversing a lower court, agreed that using the older systems effectively diluted the plaintiffs' votes and amounted to a denial of their equal-protection rights.
The recent 11th Circuit ruling says the question of "effective vote(s)" is constitutionally significant and that Wexler presented only "sparse" evidence on the matter.
Wexler's attorneys presented some statistics in the 2004 trial that showed touch-screen voters were more likely to cast blank ballots in Florida's 2002 general election than voters who used optical-scan ballots. But statistics from the 2004 presidential election, which took place after the trial, show only slight differences in the rates of uncounted ballots between electronic and paper systems.
One of Wexler's attorneys, Robert Peck of the Washington-based Center for Constitutional Litigation, agreed the rate of uncounted ballots is "substantially similar... but the case doesn't depend on that."
Peck says the fact that a paper ballot can be manually recounted and an electronic vote cannot means the votes are not being treated with "equal dignity."
Florida law calls for a manual recount when an election is decided by 0.25 percent or less to determine whether any paper ballot not counted by tabulating machines includes stray marks or other "clear indication on the ballot that the voter has made a definite choice."
Because a voter cannot make a stray mark on an electronic ballot, the state's manual recount standards for touch-screen systems call for canvassing boards to examine printed reports of how electronic votes were cast. The 11th Circuit agreed the state has "important reasons for employing different manual recount procedures according to the type of voting system a county uses" and said those differences don't violate equal protection.
Find this article at: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/search/content/nation/epaper/2006/07/01/s1b_WEXLER_0701.html

posted by J. Boulevard @ 2:49 PM