UF Professor: Legislature May Not Have Solved State’s Election Problems

April 9, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — With an eye on this November’s elections, a University of Florida professor warns that despite changes made in the wake of the state’s 2000 presidential election foul-ups, Florida has not solved some of its key voting problems.

UF political science Professor Richard Scher says election reform laws that Florida legislators approved last year are not far-reaching enough to resolve the voting problems that surfaced during the last presidential election. Scher analyzed the changes mandated by the 2001 Florida Election Reform Act passed in the aftermath of 2000 voting process problems, including poor ballot design, flawed voting machines, absentee ballot confusion, discarding of ballots, voter disqualification, and inadequate state election laws governing recounts and resolution of legal issues.

Scher’s views are included in the Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy,published by the UF Levin College of Law, to be issued this week to subscribers nationally.

“In a very real sense, by opting for technological reforms, Florida did not meet its obligation to voters to provide a mechanism for voting with clear instructions as to its proper use, to ensure the method of casting the ballot will accurately reflect the voter’s wishes and intent, and to make certain the ballot will accurately be counted, and if necessary, recounted,” Scher writes. “Nor is there any new standard for counting late and overseas ballots.”

Other contributors to the journal issue, “Beyond 2000: Law and Policy in the New Millennium,” include Bush/Cheney legal team attorney Barry Richard, Gore/Leiberman attorney W. Dexter Douglass, UF law school Dean Jon Mills, Miami Heraldpolitical Editor Tom Fiedler, Georgetown University law Professor Mark Tushnet, and Sandra Ferguson Chance, director of the UF Brechner Center for Freedom of Information.

Although the Election Reform Act is not as effective as it could be, Scher says, it is unlikely the events of 2000 will be repeated in Florida. He admits, however, Florida legislators had to take some action in the face of national concern over apparent election snafus.

“It’s like rolling the dice. How many times in a row will you roll snake eyes? It’s only happened once in our state’s history, and it’s not likely to happen again here in my lifetime,” he says.

“Some of the reforms are okay, but especially by opting for an electronic voting system, they’ve just substituted one set of problems for another,” he says. “One good change is that there now will be a central voting list, so nobody gets turned away at the polls. If there is any doubt you’re not registered, you can vote and it can be disqualified later if there’s a problem.”

Scher compliments the new law’s provision for hand recounts in the case of margins between candidates of less than 0.25 percent.

“This recount provision may well be the most remarkable feature of the legislation,” Scher writes. The reforms “will undoubtedly prove helpful beginning with the 2002 election. But these provisions are not very far-reaching and appear to be minimalist given the political pressures on the legislature to do something about the election mess,” he writes.

In his article, Scher also says Florida’s electoral system did not fail in the 2000 presidential election- it simply was not allowed to work.

“If the lawyers and judges and the media had just stayed out and let the process work itself through, it would have been slow, but it would have worked,” he says. “But I think it raised the consciousness of people. We’ve finally put that awful cliché to rest that says, ‘My vote didn’t count.’ Any time someone says that, you now can point to Florida 2000. It has heightened people’s civic awareness.”

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