Florida Makes a Stupid Move

It seems like election officials in Florida just aren’t the brightest lights in the night sky.

Get this: According to an AP article, the Florida Department of State has said that, if a recount in necessary in the next election, ballots from electronic voting machines don’t have to be recounted.

In other words, they’re saying that “Nothing could possibly be wrong with electronic voting.”

Uh-huh. As if you would trust someone from Florida to tell you what does and doesn’t work when it comes to voting.

The officials go so far as to say that these electronic voting machines don’t need to produce a paper ballot. People who cast votes with them need to trust that the machines work perfectly.

This is just plain wrong. The Florida Department of State either does not have the facts, is choosing to ignore the facts, or does not have the collective intelligence to understand the facts.

Electronic voting machines do have problems. They miscount. There are software glitches. There are significant questions still being addressed about the security of the machines. (I wrote about these things on my site, and I wrote about them in USA Today.)

It’s one thing to say they’re going forward with these “e-voting” machines. It’s quite another to ignore the obvious needs for a paper copy of ballots — a copy that will ensure that votes are counted properly.

Blind faith in these machines is foolish, dangerous, and wrong. Period.