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Suncoast Pasco News

Costly, Yet Pointless

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 30, 2008

We'll take Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson at his word that the problem experienced posting vote tallies there Tuesday night wasn't the fault of the county's still-new optical-scanning voting system. In Pasco and Pinellas, which like Hillsborough and other Florida counties were forced to switch to optical scanning by the Legislatures, things also went fairly well.

So that brings us to the question we've asked since the great Florida vote-counting controversy of 2000: What was the point of this whole exercise?

After the Bush vs. Gore dispute of eight years ago, Pasco, Pinellas and other Florida counties, on orders from Tallahassee, dropped punch-card balloting, which took much of the blame for that controversy, in favor of touch-screen voting. Then as the ink was drying on the checks that paid for those costly conversions, lawmakers ordered counties that opted for touch screens as an alternative to punch cards to make the equally costly move to optical scanning. Touch screen system can be hacked and don't create a paper trial, critics said.

Since most of the security concerns about touch-screen voting were theoretical rather than real, we remain convinced the only thing that has been accomplished over the last eight years is the wasting of a lot of money.

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