Word: scans
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...problems, leading to only short delays. The larger issue at hand is that in the interim - which was 45 minutes at one Cleveland precinct and at least four hours at a suburban voting location - voters are simply putting their ballots into locked boxes, without the ability to scan them through first. That's turning into a violation of the Help America Vote Act's second-chance voting provision...
...That doesn't mean Florida - the nation's largest swing state, with 27 electoral votes - is again headed for a 2000-style disaster. The Sunshine State seems to have instituted enough changes since then, like requiring optical-scan voting machines that provide real paper trails, to make a meltdown of that magnitude unlikely. But that's not to say that Florida in 2008 won't see a presidential vote as close as 2000's. Obama does have an unexpected lead (of an average of about 4 points) over John McCain in the Florida polls. Yet it's narrow enough...
...congressional race in Sarasota County, an incredible 15% of ballots cast on touch-screen machines registered no choice at all - in a race decided by a razor-thin margin of 386 votes. All 67 Florida counties have now adopted some form of a paper-ballot optical scan, in which votes are marked on a sheet and electronically tallied. Crist's move "was a giant step in the right direction," says Dan McCrea, head of the Florida Voters Coalition. It has also led to a more uniform voting system instead of the chaotic county-by-county melange...
...this is still Florida, after all, and the potential for a breakdown has to be considered. Optical-scan technology is relatively reliable, for example, but it's also slower - some delays due to technical glitches with the new machines were reported during Florida's early voting - and with expected turnout approaching 80% in Florida, voting-rights advocates worry about congestion and overload. Stoking the anxiety is a shortage of poll workers in larger counties like Broward, where Fort Lauderdale is located. And McCrea warns that the Florida legislature hasn't provided for enough mandatory post-election vote audits. (It requires...
...keep in working order. In the early 1960s, University of California at Berkley professor Joseph Harris suggested applying to ballots the punch-card method used by early computers - setting the stage for the hanging chad controversy of the 2000 elections. The '60s also saw the introduction of the optical-scan ballot, which borrowed IBM technology traditionally used to score standardized tests like...