Three Florida elections are facing recounts—Senate, governor, agriculture commissioner—and the chaos is a funhouse reflection of Bush v. Gore. Since 2000, multiple influxes of federal funding have been supposed to fix the state’s elections systems. And yet, here we are.
Nationally, recounts are relatively rare. A recount that reverses an election result is rarer still. But in places like Broward and Palm Beach counties, ballot mishaps seem inevitable. The samecounty that decided the fate of the presidency 18 years ago is cramming to deliver a clear-cut count today. Democrats back then blamed “butterfly ballots,” which separated the candidates into side-by-side columns and left the selection bubbles in the middle. Now, some say, it’s the fault of an overcrowded single-page ballot with the Senate race at the bottom.
“This isn’t normal,” said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and veteran election watchdog. “But it’s normal for Florida.” She’s not just referring to 2000. Something fishy happened in 1988, too, when an aberrant percentage of voters overlooked the Senate race. Those who went looking for answers laid blame on the race’s awkward ballot placement. That year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommended Florida take the “butterfly ballot” out of service (foreseeing, of all things, the hanging chad). Florida counties ignored the advice.
Today, ballot layout could be the culprit again, Mercuri contends. In Broward County, 3.7 percent of voters chose neither Senate candidate—more than twice the rate that left the race blank in neighboring counties. One leading theory has it that voters couldn’t find the race on the bottom of their busy ballot sheets, tucked below ballot instructions and with the governor’s race at the top of the next column. Florida’s ballot scanners are only built to reject a ballots only with overvotes. They don’t reject ballots with some races left blank unless it’s totally empty. The peculiar concentration of undervoters in Broward and the three surrounding counties—the same counties on which the 2000 election pivoted—has fixed election watchdogs’ focus on Florida.
But it’s not the only state with problems. Thirteen states still use paperless machines that scholar-watchdogs like Mercuri have long warned about. From the insecurity of election systems to the continued use of highly hackable electronic voting machines in more than a dozen states and yet another Broward-centric crisis of ballot layout, 2018’s topline weaknesses are all preventable problems the public knew about.
“It’s not that they’re trivial, but they could be solved,” Mercuri says. “We get all up in arms about Russian hackers—but we don’t need Russian hackers to screw up our elections. We screw em up ourselves.”
Take Broward County’s own elections supervisor Brenda Snipes, for instance. She’s been charged with multiple acts of ballot tampering, destroying and unsealing of her constituents’ ballots in different contests. And this was just last year. (Jeb Bush chose Snipes in 2003 to succeed the outgoing officeholder Miriam Oliphant, who’d also been charged with “grave neglect.”)
During this year’s recounts, Snipes and her spotty record attracted Trump’s ire—and his supporters. Chanting “lock her up” at the election supervisor may feel good to frustrated Floridians. It probably won’t help bolster the integrity of the recount, though.
Would anything? A glance at the state’s electoral history dampens any reasonable hope. Mercuri led the call in the late eighties to push for tighter regulations, which would leave less room for corruptible public officials’ to influence outcomes. While we may never know the root cause of discrepancies in South Florida, or whether glitchy voting machines had any effect on Georgia’s elections, “What we do know is that those of us who pushed for regulations were ignored.”
