At Florida Polls, Touch Screens and Crossed Fingers

Florida legislators voted this year to ban new touch-screen voting machines, but the next set of machines won't be ready until November's general election. The state will have to use the controversial machines for Tuesday's primary. (By Joe Raedle -- Getty Images)

The new touch-screen machines were in place in Sarasota for the election, and they were assumed to be an improvement. But after the polls closed, a troubling anomaly appeared in the results.

There were 18,000 "undervotes" in Sarasota County -- that is, 18,000 people showed up to the polls and chose candidates in other contests but not in the prominent and hard-fought congressional race. In the four other counties where voters cast ballots in the same race, the undervote percentage was far smaller.

What happened?

The undervotes, some speculated, could have been the result of a confusing ballot design that led voters to skip over the race. Others guessed that the negative tone of the campaign led voters to skip it.

But some suspected that the machines dropped the votes, and a scattering of voters claimed the machines had given them trouble.

Exactly what happened has not been resolved.

None of the official investigations found a bug in the machines that would have caused the dropped votes.

But that, some of the same investigators say, doesn't mean there wasn't a flaw.

In October, the U.S. Government Accountability Office summarized the state of the investigations and research into what happened this way:

"We found that some of the prior tests and reviews provide assurance that the voting systems in Sarasota County functioned correctly, but they are not enough to provide reasonable assurance that the [machines] did not contribute to the undervote."

It also warned that even with more tests, there will never be certainty about what happened: "Absolute assurance is impossible to achieve."

If the machines had left a paper trail of each voter's actions -- such as the punch cards or the lottery-ticket ballots -- many believe auditors would have had important clues to what happened.

"The point is, these [touch-screen] machines don't maintain any records that would allow you to see whether voters were having difficulties," said Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has studied the machines. "The race in Florida's 13th Congressional District was a perfect example of that."

In the wake of the investigations and ambiguity, the Florida legislature moved earlier this year to switch to voting machines that leave a paper trail.

In places such as Miami-Dade and Broward counties, which spent $24.5 million and $17 million, respectively, for the touch-screen machines, that means having to shell out again for new machines. With the exception of Sarasota County, the counties switching machines will not be ready with the technology until the next election.

For now, election supervisors are expressing confidence in the machines they are about to abandon.

"We don't have any reason to believe that they're not reliable," said Sterling E. Ivey, spokesman for the state elections officials.

But if they're reliable, why did the legislature move to get rid of them? "Floridians have said they want to be able to cast a ballot on a piece of paper," Ivey said. "We're moving to a paper system to help restore confidence."