October 26, 2002	Saturday	Sha’aban 19,1423

WASHINGTON: The 2000 election “Florida fiasco” that left vote counters squinting at “hanging” and “pregnant” chads bulging from paper ballots and made the US voting system the laughing stock of the world has spurred a national election overhaul.

Eager to prevent another foul-up, the US Congress in October approved a $3.86 billion bill revamping the voting system, including machine and voter registration database upgrades and vote-counting standards.

This November 5, as voters once more head to their local polling booths to choose their governors, senators and members of the House of Representatives, they will notice some changes.

Voters in Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Texas and Washington will cast their ballots on slick, new, user-friendly machines, according to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform.

Florida has spent some $32 million to sort out its voting system. Votes will be counted electronically in the southeastern US state, with ballots either being scanned or entered directly through a touch-screen system.

And election observers will be heading for wealthy Miami-Dade county, where troubled past elections left many, particularly minorities, complaining of unfair treatment and uncounted votes.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People has filed a class action suit against then-Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, claiming that black voters faced “unjustified barriers” to voting and were wrongfully purged from official lists of eligible voters.

But in Florida’s recent September 10 primary, new procedures and machines aimed at fixing irregularities “contributed to, rather than diminished election-day chaos,” the commission said in its report on election reform.

In the state’s Broward and Miami-Dade counties — infamous for the confusion surrounding the 2000 election that Republican President George W. Bush eventually won — poll workers stayed home, the machines refused to boot up, Democrats received Republican ballots and vice-versa.

Scott Lansell, coordinator for US elections assistance initiatives for the International Foundation for Election Systems explained the glitches: “New equipment can overwhelm people sometimes.”

But while everyone’s eyes are trained on Florida this year, accusations are already beginning to fly about polling stations abuses in southern Arkansas state and Texas where local and congressional elections have started early.—AFP