Interview with a Florida Elections Expert Part I (History, 2000-The Present)

As voters look ahead to next year’s elections, many of us are concerned that issues from recent elections - voter fraud, voter suppression, and problems with electronic voting machines - will again rear their ugly heads. What should we as voters understand about the recent past, and what is being done to ensure that Americans can vote securely for the coming elections?

Some interesting - and worrying - answers to these questions come from Dan McCrea, an elections expert from Florida who has been working for election reform since 2003. McCrea has testified at the federal, state, and local levels on election issues, and in 2007 co-founded the Florida Voters Coalition, the first state-wide election organization in Florida. This, the first part of my interview with McCrea, covers issues with elections in 2000, 2004, and 2006 in Florida and nationwide.

The 2000 elections occurred before McCrea began his work with election reform, but no election reform activist, particularly in Florida, can ignore the issues 2000 raised. McCrea has made a careful study of events in Florida and drawn important conclusions.

In 2000, he says, “the fact that our ‘right to vote’ is a state by state ‘right’ with little federal grounding became apparent.” Contrary to popular belief, he continues, “Americans have no direct constitutional right to vote.”

The 2000 elections showed how dysfunctional our decentralized voting process can be. “The train-wreck of multiple county systems and state political interests feuding and fighting, eventually having to be decided by an horrific Supreme Court decision demonstrated that in America, citizens’ right to vote, such as it is, varies across 50 sets of rules (the states) that are administered by over 3,000 US counties.”

For McCrea, Florida’s experience in the 2000 elections also demonstrated that election reform should be a bipartisan issue. “Democrats,” he told me, “behaved no better than Republicans in Florida. Gore’s legal team wanted four counties re-counted – not all sixty-seven. Democrats were no more interested in counting all the votes than Republicans.”

Legislation that came out of the Florida debacle, instead of boosting voters’ rights, actually made the situation worse. “The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), the landmark election reform bill passed by Congress in the aftermath of 2000, set in motion expensive, insecure, and unreliable voting systems and yet another form of a government-enabled business bonanza for private corporations. Worst of all, those private corporations have convinced lawmakers and the courts that they should own the election information and be allowed to keep it private – a dangerous insult to a democratic system of government.”

When the problems in Florida went unsolved after 2000, they were doomed to be repeated - in Ohio, which McCrea calls “the Florida of 2004.” Similarities between Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 included the fact that “like Florida Secretary of State, and the state’s Chief Elections Officer, Katherine Harris, in 2000, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell also served as the Bush Campaign’s state co-chair.”

McCrea believes that we must eliminate such potential conflicts of interest by requiring a “cooling off period” when officials move from the government to the private sector in elections work. “Until these and other glaring ethics gaps are closed,” he says, “elections will always be vulnerable to improper influence and corruption…Ethics laws remain either too weak or not properly enforced in most states today. Nothing stops the Harris/Blackwell condition from occurring again today in Florida (or Ohio I believe).”

Other similarities stand out as well, including reports of voter intimidation in urban, minority areas like Cleveland. Another form of voter suppression was the crippling confusion that surrounded many individual polling stations. “Numerous polling places were starved for working equipment or supplies, roles were corrupted or incomplete, precincts couldn’t open on time, groups of voters received calls the night before the election fraudulently telling them their polling place had been moved – all causing voters to be turned away in certain precincts. In the end, multiple officials were jailed or fired and some say Ohio, and therefore the Presidential election, was thrown or could have been thrown and we’ll never know.

“What we saw in Ohio, and the various issues involved, are far from over. They may yet make for historic revelation. It is unlikely, however, that revelation will come from finding or counting more votes…Any historic revelation coming from the elections of 2000 and 2004 will come from investigation of what people did – and even that will probably require someone that someone flips – someone talks.”

While Florida, and to a greater extent Ohio, remain electoral mysteries, election issues in Sarasota, Florida in 2006 seemed to offer election activists the best chance they had yet had of using the legal process to obtain greater transparency in elections.

Many of the issues raised in the court cases associated with the disputed 2006 election for the seat of Congressman Vern Buchanan (FL-13) were detailed in a previous Seminal article by Mac, “Sarasota Blues.” In brief, the legal process practically ground to a halt when a Florida judge ruled that the public could not have access to the voting machines company’s source code because it would violate the company’s right to its trade secrets. McCrea, who helped work on the case, provided us with an update.

After months of investigation prompted by the case which Democrat Christine Jennings (the other candidate for the disputed seat) filed with the US Congress, the General Accounting Office reviewed Florida’s audit of the Sarasota vote and released a report (.pdf) on October 2nd entitled “Further Testing Could Provide Increased but Not Absolute Assurance That Voting Systems Did Not Cause Undervotes in Florida’s 13th Congressional District.”

Back in Florida, McCrea is dismayed by how events have progressed. The court cases, he said, have “slowed to a crawl.” Jennings and Buchanan will have a rematch in 2008, but larger issues remain unresolved - and unsettling:

“What is profoundly disturbing is that Sarasota’s undervote case represented the strongest case yet to compel the vendor to allow its proprietary hardware and software to be scrutinized in a failed election – and the court denied it. The court said that the vendor’s rights to protect its private proprietary property, protected by federal intellectual property law, trumped the public’s right to investigate a serious anomaly in a federal election to seat a member of Congress. It does not bode well for the future of democracy, the battle to contain corporate influence in government, and the public’s trust in any branch of the government to observe basic fairness and the transparency we all have assumed must be protected somewhere in American jurisprudence.”

With so many questions from our recent electoral past unsettled, looking optimistically at the question of voters’ rights for the next election seems difficult. However, McCrea - and like-minded activists all over the country - continue to fight for reform and transparency in our electoral process. Stay tuned for the next segment of the interview, in which McCrea discusses current activist efforts and what ordinary citizens can do to get involved.

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