Herald Tribune: The buck stops with SOE Kathy Dent In Sarasota Debacle

[philb]

The buck stops with Kathy Dent
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061121/OPINION/611210600/1029

The greed of our current breed of politicians has given a whole new meaning to "the buck stops here." For Harry Truman, it meant one can't buck a problem around an organization forever; responsibility should stop at the top.

I can't say which sense of "buck" is behind the current fiasco of an 18,000-person undercount in the voting for Congressional District 13, but the responsibility for sure has to start and stop with Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent. Why?

1. She recommended a process that provided no audit trail, thereby changing the definition of "recount" to "reread the same machine-generated numbers over and over." There is nothing to recount.

2. She approved the layout of the touch screens in the congressional race -- a layout that experts have testified guaranteed an undercount in Sarasota. Seventy-five years of studies in advertising and marketing prove that visual placement is everything in determining response. Advertising rates and supermarket-shelf placement are based on it! No surprise that elections can be manipulated by it.

3. She selected a system that provides no way to check code inside the touch-screen machines to determine whether, for example, a vote on a given party's line will be ignored unless repeated a second time. My 35 years of experience in systems programing tells me that programing such a thing is a piece of cake; yet Dent accepted a system with secret "proprietary code" owned by the private company supplying the equipment and not open to public scrutiny.

No audit trail. No checks and balances. No public scrutiny. If something goes wrong, blame the victims.

It's time for Dent to do her job, and this time to get things right when she chooses the new voting machines the voters have demanded.