St. Petersburg times
Disabled seek greater voice in new voting method

By STEVE BOUSQUET

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 25, 2001
TALLAHASSEE -- Being born blind didn't stop James Kracht from going to
law school. But it has discouraged the 50-year-old Miami lawyer from
carrying out
a cherished civic duty: voting.

TALLAHASSEE -- Being born blind didn't stop James Kracht from going to
law school. But it has discouraged the 50-year-old Miami lawyer from
carrying out
a cherished civic duty: voting.

Kracht took Tuesday off from his job as an assistant Miami-Dade county
attorney and joined others with disabilities at the Capitol. They urged
Secretary
of State Katherine Harris to use her rulemaking authority to require that
new systems must be accessible to all voters, including those who can't
see or
hear or walk.

The Florida Council of the Blind estimates more than 250,000 of Florida's
9-million voters are visually impaired, and hundreds of thousands more
have physical
disabilities. Hundreds of Florida voting precincts are in churches, which
are exempt from the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

As Florida overhauls its election machinery because of the problems
exposed by the November election, advocates for the disabled say the
state should seize
the moment before it slips away.

"I want to be sure that every Floridian has the right to independently
cast a secret ballot," Kracht testified. "This fundamental, basic civil
right must
finally become a reality so that all Floridians are able to cast ballots
privately and independently in a verifiable manner."

Like others who testified Tuesday, Kracht, a member of the Council of the
Blind, urged the state to quickly certify touch-screen voting machines
and to
encourage voting by phone.

Kracht said he went to the polls last November and tried to vote without
help. "I've never been so humiliated and embarrassed and had such a
horrible experience
in 50 years of living," he said.

Kracht said the state should demand machines that let people with
disabilities cast ballots without help from others, unless they ask for
it.

The 90-minute meeting was an arcane procedure known as a rule development
workshop. Laws written by legislators do not cover everything, so
lawmakers delegate
many details to state agencies that are required to solicit public
comment before enacting new rules.

Voting systems now in use in Florida are not required to be accessible to
the disabled, and people with disabilities say that with the focus on
overvoted
and undervoted punch card ballots, they were given short shrift by the
bipartisan elections task force that held hearings around the state
earlier this
year.

Doug Towne of St. Petersburg, vice president of the Florida Coalition on
Disability Rights, said he fears counties will do nothing to help people
with disabilities
unless the state demands it -- and puts up some of the money.

Cost is a big factor. Harris opened the workshop by saying Florida should
"lead the way" in improving accessibility to voting. She formed a task
force to
study the issue.

The panel, led by Republican Rep. Larry Crow of Palm Harbor, is getting
organized at a time when counties must decide how much to spend on new
voting equipment
before the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year.

Robert Miller, president of the Florida Council of the Blind, told
Harris' elections experts to forget the optical scan systems favored by
many counties,
because they are not user-friendly for people with disabilities.

"We need to rule out what will not work," said Miller, who touted touch
screens or telephone voting instead.

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho, a leading advocate of
optical scanners at each precinct, said he too is frustrated by the fact
that no system
certified in Florida is fully accessible to all. "This state has taken
elections for granted for far too long," Sancho said. "Elections must be
a priority."

- Times researcher Deirdre Morrow contributed to this report.


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