By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, July 30, 2004; 10:18 AM

The Sunshine State, still smarting from the 2000 presidential election debacle, is once again making headlines for problems with its voting technology, this time with the new high-tech machines that state officials rushed to install to avoid another controversial vote count.

Officials from sprawling Miami-Dade County this week acknowledged that technical problems resulted in the loss of most of the electronic records for the 2002 gubernatorial primary, and the glitch is being held up by e-voting critics as yet another example of the pitfalls and lack of security with touch-screen machines.

According to the New York Times, which first reported the news on Tuesday, county elections officials said the "records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year." The Times noted that the "news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May. The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines."

A Miami Herald article provided more details: "This is not the first problem in preserving reliable records. After a May 2003 election in Miami Beach, Orlando Suarez, division director of Miami-Dade County's technology department, found that the audit log mixed up the serial numbers of voting machines, making it difficult to figure out which machines were where. In an October examination of a Homestead election, Suarez found that the event log failed to report 162 votes. 'I believe that there is/are a serious 'bug' in the program(s) that generate these reports, making the reports unusable for the purpose that we were considering (audit an election, recount an election and, if necessary, use these reports to certify an election),' Suarez wrote" in a June 2003 memo.

County officials maintain that the problems have been fixed. "Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said on Tuesday that the office had put in place a daily backup procedure so that computer crashes would not wipe out audit records in the future," wrote the New York Times. "We have full confidence in the certified equipment that worked flawlessly in the 2002 elections and in hundreds of successful elections around the state since then," said a spokeswoman for Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, according to the AP. "There is no reason to suggest that they will not perform just as well in November."

The Miami-Dade election records news was seized on by anti-e-voting activists and Democrats hoping to score points against Florida's elected Republican leaders. "Florida Democrats said Wednesday that they will push for independent monitoring of the electronic machines used by half of the state's voters," the Miami Herald reported.

Lida Rodriguez-Tasseff, chair of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition -- a voting rights group that uncovered the problem, told the Washington Post: "We are no safer than we were in 2000. We may have even bigger problems that we don't even know about."

"The revelations about lost records in Miami compounded a sense of anxiety among voters' rights groups, some of which are calling for congressional and Justice Department investigations of Florida's system," the Post said. "It is becoming more and more clear every day -- one obstacle after another, one mismanagement after another -- that Florida's secretary of state's office cannot manage its election," Sharon Lettman, deputy national field director of People for the American Way, told the Post.

The troubles in Florida have attracted the attention of muckraking documentarian Michael Moore. Moore, whose anti-Bush administration "Fahrenheit 9/11" is in theaters now, "told Florida delegates that he would come to Florida before the Nov. 2 election 'to put a huge spotlight' on the way the state is preparing to conduct voting in the presidential election," the Miami Herald reported. Members of the state's Democratic congressional delegation are adding more fuel to the fire. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Palm Beach), "who filed unsuccessful lawsuits to require a paper trail, warned that Florida risked a repeat of the 2000 election debacle this fall unless better security, monitoring and poll-worker training is put in place."

In today's headlines, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported, "An embarrassed state Republican Party apologized Thursday for a GOP campaign brochure that urged voters to use absentee ballots, undermining efforts by Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood to inspire confidence in new touch-screen voting machines."

In related news, election reform advocates on Tuesday "asked a judge to strike down a state rule preventing counties that use [high-tech voting] machines from conducting manual recounts from them. State election officers say manual recounts are not needed since the machines tell each voter if they are skipping a race, known as an undervote, and will not let them vote twice for the same race, known as an overvote. The officials also maintain that the computer systems running the machines can be trusted to count the votes accurately as they're cast, and give the final numbers when needed. But lawyers representing the ACLU and other groups said the state should require a paper trail in case a physical recount is needed, as it was in the 2000 presidential race in Florida," the Associated Press reported.

The state's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is also in on the court action. "Our concern is voter confidence," Howard Simon of the ACLU of Florida told the court, according to the Tampa Tribune. "There is no way to know if a vote isn't counted by one of these machines."

In another battleground state, Computerworld reported that "the Citizens' Alliance for Secure Elections, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Verified Voting Foundation asked a federal court in Ohio to refrain from mandating the use of any e-voting system that doesn't provide a voter-verifiable paper ballot. The court is poised to rule on a lawsuit challenging the use of punch card and optical scan systems."

Elsewhere in Florida, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced this week that it is shuttering a $472-million trial computer project at Bay Pines VA Medical Center in St. Petersburg. The project was nixed "because it doesn't work. Technicians immediately will begin switching the hospital back to the old system by Sept. 30, the end of the VA's fiscal year, Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo, said Monday," the St. Petersburg Times reported.

The newspaper provided details on just how badly the system performed: "Installed last October, the troubled computer system was designed to track finances and inventory for the VA's $64-billion nationwide budget. Bay Pines was one test site; other hospitals were scheduled to follow. But the system was plagued with problems from the start. When it struggled to order supplies, surgeries were delayed. At one point, employees bought their own plastic gloves to draw blood. Staff members complained that they could not keep track of hospital expenditures. As recently as last month, hospital administrators told congressional investigators that they could not account for almost $300,000."

The article was picked up by the Associated Press, which said the tech problems at Bay Pines led five VA officials to either quit or be reassigned. "An agency spokesman said Tuesday he could not say whether any of the money spent on the failed system would be recovered," the AP noted.

IBM has been tapped to build a supercomputer for the Navy, a project that will result in the military's fastest supercomputer. The Naval Oceanographic Office commissioned the new supercomputer, which will perform at "a peak speed of 20 teraflops, or 20 trillion operations per second, according to IBM officials. Navy officials will deploy the system at the office's Major Shared Resource Center, located at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The purchase also includes a fast supercomputer cluster," Federal Computer Week reported.

"The supercomputer, which IBM said will cost less than $100 million, will be used to produce short-term weather forecasts for Navy fleets at sea. The Pentagon said the supercomputer's immense power will allow military scientists to model atmosphere and ocean dynamics for the entire surface of the Earth. The computer also will be able to analyze aircraft material at a molecular level to produce wings less likely to crack and to examine the flow of water around submarine hulls to improve their design," The Washington Post said.

InfoWorld has more details on the computer, called Kraken (named after the sea monster of Norse mythology). "Kraken is designed to let naval scientists and engineers more quickly solve problems that can affect the outcome of military engagements. Among other things, it will improve their weather forecasting, missile design, and oceanographic-mapping capabilities. The system is scheduled to begin operating by September."

In other supercomputer news, Silicon Graphics Inc. and Intel Corp. are working on a supercomputer project for NASA, Federal Computer Week reported. "Project Columbia, expected to give NASA's supercomputing capacity a tenfold boost, will simulate future missions, project how humans affect weather patterns and help design exploration vehicles," the article said.

Some good news for the government contracting market: Federal agencies have been awarding more IT contracts this year, according to a new report from market research firm Input. Federal agencies doled out more than $23 billion in IT-themed prime contracts in 2004's second quarter, 50 percent more than the same time last year.

"According to the report, five departments -- Homeland Security, Army, Navy, Air Force and Transportation -- awarded 90 percent, or $21 billion of all contract dollars in the second quarter. The Homeland Security Department was the biggest spender, awarding contracts worth $10.7 billion, of which $10 billion was awarded to Accenture Ltd. of Hamilton, Bermuda, for [US VISIT]. In comparison, DHS awarded just $93 million in contracts in the second quarter of 2003," Government Computer News said. National Journal's Technology Daily picked up on Input's survey and noted that "Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are tied for winning the most IT contracts during the quarter." CNET's News.com also covered the study.

* In more e-voting news, software entrepreneur Rebecca Mercuri "issued a challenge Thursday to computer hackers attending their annual Black Hat conference, encouraging them to test whether it's possible to rig an election," the Associated Press reported.

* The Center for Digital Government is out with its annual ranking of the top "digital states." Michigan came in at No. 1 this year, and here's why, according to the center's Paul W. Taylor: "Michigan has changed the citizen and business experience through a broad suite of real-time transactional services, powered by an increasingly shared and robust infrastructure, designed around a coherent statewide architecture, and supported by a collaborative planning process."

* Finding medical data online can be daunting, particularly when looking for information from legitimate sources and authorities on medical care. A government Web site called ClinicalTrials.gov has proved to be a treasure trove for people seeking information on current clinical trials for various illnesses, according to a Washington Post article.

* CNET's News.com has an article looking at whether peer-to-peer networks are being used to leak military secrets, including pictures and secret documents.

* San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor wrote this week about Strong Angel II, a project "to help create a way for military and civilian disaster-relief people to deal more efficiently with each other -- and with the people who need assistance -- in the turmoil that follows catastrophes." Government and other emergency services experts gathered recently in Hawaii for a realistic exercise "meant to approximate some of the harsh conditions aid workers would find in the wake of war or natural disaster." Excerpt: "Silicon Valley played a role. A digital video start-up from San Jose, VSee Lab, experimented with software it has created for high-quality video conferencing. VSee's founder and chief technology officer, a recent Stanford doctorate graduate named Milton Chen, put Web cameras through some paces, including one underwater transmission to a nearby laptop."

E-mail government IT tips, comments and links to cindyDOTwebbATwashingtonpost.com