Election official can make big difference in how your vote is counted, says Ion Sancho ***By Nancy Ann James Special to The Sun ****Quick, Walton County voters! Who is running for supervisor of elections in November? ****Who cares? That might be the reaction of most voters in almost any county you can name. ****To Ion Sancho the problem starts right there. People generally do not recognize how much the supervisor of elections can do to create favorable conditions for people voting ? and having their votes counted correctly. If the election system is broken, then the United States is not functioning as a democracy. And right now, said Sancho, the system is broken. ****Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County for 18 years, addressed the Democratic Women?s Clubs of Florida recently as they celebrated their 50th anniversary with a convention at Sandestin recently. ****So what?s the big deal about the supervisor of elections office? They just conduct elections, right? And after all the elections we?ve held in this country, that should be pretty much standardized by now. Right? ****Wrong! ?It?s not just a matter of holding an election,? Sancho exclaims. ?It?s a matter of counting people?s votes properly.? He is first and foremost an advocate for citizens, to ensure that their votes will be counted as cast, he said in a recent interview. ****?I am appalled at the state of elections administration in Florida,? Sancho said emphatically. ?Too many elections officials see their jobs as bureaucrats. They are not concerned. They want to make the job easier for themselves. They want to do things ?the way they?ve always been done.?? ****In 2000, the world?s attention was drawn to the problems with Florida?s election system. ?It was a disaster waiting to happen,? Sancho says. ****But what happened afterward was, ?the big counties with punch-card voting were deeply embarrassed. They had been laughed at. They did not want to use paper any more.? ****One election official told Sancho he was going with touchscreen voting, declaring ?We?ll never have another recount again.? ****But the problems with touchscreen machines were just beginning to be evident, and since 2000 have become rampant around the country. Many of the machines have locked up or frozen, and have improperly recorded votes. Other problems include faulty memory cards (which hold the votes that are later counted); technology that?s easy to hack into to rig an election; a software ?patch? that can be inserted to fix a problem ? or change a result; and lack of a paper trail so a recount can be held. ****Even in this year?s primaries, in one Texas County electronic machines counted 100,000 more votes than had actually been cast. ****At Princeton University, according to a study released last month, computer scientists created vote-changing software that can be inserted into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute ? and no one can tell it?s there. They also came up with a virus that was able to infect other parts of the voting system, so that ?widespread fraud? could be committed easily. ****?Almost every board of election has staff members with the technical ability to ?fix? an election,? Sancho said. ****Thus the cry from many quarters for a verifiable paper trail to be used with any electronic voting machine. In fact around 28 states now require a paper trail, and 17 of them say the paper ballot is the legal one, according to Sancho. ****Instead the Florida legislature has gone in the other direction. While the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act requires that voting machines have ?manual audit capacity??in other words, a paper trail that can be recounted or audited ? Florida passed a law making it illegal to access that capacity. Legislators and supervisors of elections ?are trying to control the process to their benefit,? said Sancho. ****In fact, he added, ?politics has played a role in every Florida electoral decision since the 2000 election.? ****A political independent, Sancho believes the office of supervisor of elections should be nonpartisan. A national commission came up with a proposal he supports: ?Have an independent, nonpartial election administration in every state, professionally run, with a State Board of Elections independent of government and politics.? A handful of states have implemented this idea, he said. ****What can a supervisor of elections do to encourage citizen voting? ?I?ve been fighting to reduce the bureaucratic hoops and barriers for 18 years now,? Sancho said. He points to his own record in Leon County of spending the most money in the state on voter education programs ? which has led to the lowest error rate and also the highest turnout rate in the state, for years. In the recent primaries, when Walton County had a 25 percent turnout, Leon County had 38 percent. ****And what if anything can Florida voters do? ****?Demand that Florida verify and audit their elections. If the technology can?t do it, get rid of it. Ask people running for office ? especially for governor and the state legislature ? what they would do to fix this problem. Write letters to the editor. Talk about the issue among fellow voters. Listen to what Lou Dobbs is saying about this issue on CNN, and others. Don?t be so trusting that everything is going to run smoothly. As Ronald Reagan said, ?Trust but verify.?? ****Oh yes ? the answer to the question posed above? Running for supervisor of elections in Walton County in November are incumbent Bobby Beasley, Republican, and Ray Padgett, Democrat.
