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Florida Secretary of State says computers are not computers, denies responsibility for upcoming fiasco

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood was in Miami yesterday to calm fears of another problem-plagued election this November. With a controversial new “felon” purge list having just been released and with more and more voters clamoring for a receipt from new computerized paperless voting machines, it would seem that Jeb! appointee Glenda would have her work cut out for her. Nah - she’s not worried about a thing.

Hood, grilled by league members with serious reservations about the county's voting equipment, repeatedly sought to distance her office from election operations.

''I have absolutely no authority over the running of elections in this state,'' said Hood, a former Orlando mayor who was appointed to the job by Gov. Jeb Bush. She said the department's responsibilities include certifying voting equipment, ensuring that supervisors follow state law and verifying election results.

Editor’s note: From the Florida Department of State - Office of the Secretary

In addition, the Secretary of State is Florida’s chief elections officer...

Now, back to our article:

The new machines have come under scrutiny for the lack of a paper trail, but Hood defended the touch-screen machines and likened some of the criticism -- that the machines could be tampered with -- to conspiracy theories.

''The touch-screen machines are not computers,'' she said. ``You'd have to go machine by machine, all over the state.''

Uh, Glenda, they actually are computers. What the Miami machines are not is networked computers, however that does not eliminate the very real possibility of tampering. From earlier in the same article:

But Hood acknowledged her office is investigating a voting machine glitch in Miami-Dade County, which she said was not properly reported to the state.

A spokesman for Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan noted it was the county that detected the problem and said that Kaplan had sought to balance the need to report potential problems against unnecessarily alarming the public.

The glitch involves the auditing system of the iVotronic touch-screen machines Miami-Dade and Broward installed after the mishaps that plagued the 2000 presidential election.

County officials have said the glitch does not affect voting -- only the audits performed days after the election itself. The problem, according to Kaplan, is in the flashcard that downloads the voting information.

When the votes are downloaded, some machines scramble the serial number of the machine, making it difficult to identify where the votes came from.

Hood said her office is investigating ''whether it's truly a problem or not.'' County officials said they could resolve the problem.

The issue arose after a citizens' group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, filed a public records request and received county memos criticizing the computerized audit.

Hey Glenda, check this out: I’m a right wing partisan hack, and I want to tamper with the election. Having perused exactly one short Miami Herald article, I’ve figured out that I can simply switch flash cards or tamper with flash cards en-route to the counting places where the information is to be transferred. There is no kind of paper trail of actual votes whatsoever, so even if the vote totals look “funny”, there’s no way to do a manual recount.

So, no, I wont be tampering with every computerized voting machine in the state. I don’t have to. I just need a few hundred more votes for my man W. See, once we combine the felon purge list with a partisan Secretary of State and partisan County Elections Supervisors, maybe even sprinkle in some good old fashioned election day police intimidation, why we can’t lose.

See you in November!