USA Today editorializes on the latest Florida voting scandal. We know that we can't count on Florida to solve this problem. This requires a national solution:
Officials in Sarasota County, the largest county in Florida's 13th congressional district, are at a loss to explain why more than 13% of the voters there — about 18,000 people — did not register a vote in the House race. Only 1.8% of county voters using paper absentee ballots didn't vote for a member of Congress. And in adjoining counties, the percentage of people not voting in the race was also in the low single digits.This problem has to be addressed by Congress. The mistakes were blatant in Florida. Those mistakes undermine our democracy. And, if this can happen in one congressional district in Florida (the one represented by Katherine Harris no less), it can -- and does happen elsewhere.
An analysis by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that if those 18,000 people had voted proportionally to the county's overall vote, Democrat Christine Jennings would have won by about 600 votes. As it is, Republican Vern Buchanan has a 369-vote victory.
The bigger issue here, the one that transcends Florida, is the inadequacy of touch-screen machines that don't leave any sort of paper trail. Without a paper record of each vote cast, it's impossible to figure out what, if anything, went wrong. Perhaps people tried to vote but a computer glitch caused their votes cast to go uncounted. Or perhaps they simply didn't see the House race the way it was arranged on the screen.
Voting systems are never going to be perfect. But they should have one thing going for them. They should inspire confidence. That's not likely to happen unless there's a way of closely examining the way votes were cast in instances when questions arise.
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