Jeb Bush's appointed secretary of state fought attempts by the ACLU and other groups to reverse a decision prohibiting manual recounts of machine-generated vote totals. But a Tallahassee judge ruled in favor of the voter rights groups late Friday, clearing the way for possible recounts. A Florida appeals court has ruled against Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) in a lawsuit aimed at requiring electronic voting machines to produce backup paper records.
The preelection controversies have revisited many of the same issues and places that made the 2000 contest one of the most disputed in history. In Palm Beach, home of the infamous "butterfly ballot," the new rage is the "broken arrow" ballot. The ballot -- unveiled by Theresa Lepore, the elections supervisor responsible for the butterfly ballot -- asks voters to draw a line between the opposite ends of an arrow to indicate their choice. Critics say it is confusing, and they worry that voters will circle the arrows or mark them with an "X."
"They'll do some crazy things with them," Stephen Ansolabehere, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology election expert, said of the broken-arrow ballots.
In Miami-Dade County, the elections office recently said it lost all records of the October 2002 governor's race. Then, days later, it said they were merely misplaced. In the same county, Simon, the ACLU director, ran into trouble trying to cast his vote at an early-voting location in the Miami suburb where he lives. A poll worker, he said, initially refused to let him vote unless he could produce identification, a violation of a state law that allows voters without identification to sign an affidavit instead of showing an ID.
"This is an example of how not all of our problems are technology problems or bad and nefarious laws," he said.
The primary will be the first major election in the state since Florida was forced to abandon a list that it had used to purge dead people and felons from the voter rolls. Bush's administration had defended the use of the list. But the state discontinued it last month after news organizations found that the list included the names of 2,000 felons whose rights had been restored -- many of them African Americans, a demographic group that has tended to vote for Democrats in Florida -- and few Hispanics, a group that has tended to vote for Republicans in the state.
With all the criticism of election officials grabbing headlines, voters in at least one county will get to make a direct statement about the future of voting here. Among those running for reelection in Palm Beach County is a familiar name: Theresa Lepore.
Becker reported from Washington.
