New York Times - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.
A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times. "This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition.
This isn't a Democrats vs. Republicans issue. This is just plain dumb. Members of both parties should be trying to find out what in the hell is going on in Florida that they can't hold a single election without having some sort of a mix-up with the ballots. These ballot screw-ups can cut both ways. If there's evidence of another mix-up in November the ensuing wrangling between the political parties is going to do an immeasurable amount of harm to our nation.
Really, what does this tell the rest of the world when one of the states in our union can't even run an election properly?