>>> The State of Florida is deliberating the fate of the 6 million ballots from the 2000 election. One option under serious consideration is simply destroying them. Such records can be pulped 22 months after an election, but the deadline in this case has been extended until 1 June 2003.

After reading the story below, please contact state officials in Florida and ask them to preserve the ballots from the 2000 election. Although most of us aren't Floridians, those ballots are a crucial part of US politics and history. They form the basis for understanding the most controversial election in American history. Destroying them would create a huge, irreversible loss.

Florida Division of Library and Information Services

Their contact page

Florida legislature's Website

Florida governor's Website

By George Bennett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 29, 2002

Once they were scrutinized and argued over one by one. Their chads were examined for telltale dimples. Armed deputies guarded them. TV cameras in helicopters monitored their progress from West Palm Beach to Tallahassee.

Now Palm Beach County's infamous punch cards from the 2000 presidential election sit in a warehouse awaiting a final archiving -- or a date with a document shredder.

Palm Beach County's 460,000 ballots and about 5.5 million others around the state are suspended in public-records limbo while state officials decide whether some or all of them should be preserved for historians who want to study the most controversial election in U.S. history.

Under normal circumstances, ballots can be destroyed 22 months after an election.

But the 2000 election, with its 36-day aftermath of recounts and litigation, was anything but normal.

The Florida Division of Library and Information Services, which oversees the state's record-retention program, told Florida's 67 county elections supervisors in June that the period for retaining 2000 elections materials had been "voluntarily extended" until July 1, 2003.

The extension will give state legislators time to strike "a balance between the potential historical significance of these ballots and the cost of their preservation," Division Director Barratt Wilkins wrote.

University of Florida history Professor Julian Pleasants hopes the state preserves as much 2000 election material as possible.

"It is absolutely critical that some votes -- I mean actual votes with hanging chads or dimples or whatever -- be saved so that one at a later time could look at these votes and understand what we were talking about," Pleasants said.

Pleasants served on a committee appointed by the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections last year to suggest which records should be preserved. He'd like to preserve all 6 million ballots. But he said the committee never concluded how much material to save or how and where to keep it.

Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio, who appointed the preservation committee when she was president of the election supervisors group in 2001, worries that important historical records will be lost if the state lets individual supervisors decide what to do with ballots.

"I don't know what a new supervisor might do. A new supervisor could take them to the recycling bin," says Iorio, who might leave her job as soon as next month to run for mayor of Tampa.

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said she'll wait for direction from the state.

In the meantime, the county's punch cards -- the very ones that introduced to the world the term "hanging chad" -- sit in white cardboard cartons. The cartons are shrink-wrapped and stacked on two pallets on shelves about 10 feet above the floor in a warehouse at elections headquarters west of West Palm Beach.

Two other pallets are stacked with boxes of sample ballot booklets from 2000. There are boxes of unused punch cards, sign-in sheets from each of the county's 543 precincts, test ballots used by poll workers to make sure machines worked and other paperwork.

There are also thousands of pages of candidate listings that were once crimped to voting machines to form what became known as the "butterfly ballot."

The county has gotten rid of nearly all the Votomatics and DataPunch voting devices to which the butterfly ballots were attached. One Votomatic was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. About 600 Votomatics with attached butterfly ballots were auctioned off on eBay last year to collectors as part of $300 and $600 commemorative packages. The remaining machines -- about 3,500 -- were stripped of their butterfly ballots and sold this year to a businessman who bid $4,539 for the lot.

The punch card ballots are the Rosetta stone of the 2000 election. They are stiff pieces of paper measuring about 7 1/2 by 3 1/4 inches and containing 228 perforated rectangular boxes called chads. Votes were tallied by machines that read light passing through the holes created when voters punched out the chads. When voters failed to completely dislodge chads -- leaving them hanging, dimpled, dented, pin-pricked or pregnant -- arguments ensued over whether the ballots should be counted.

Different counties ended up setting different standards for counting them. Seven of nine U.S. Supreme Court justices found the lack of uniformity to be a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Five of nine believed the problem couldn't be remedied; their decision effectively decided the election for George W. Bush.

The Florida Legislature outlawed punch cards in 2001. Palm Beach County and most of the other large counties that used punch cards switched to electronic touch screens this year.

Palm Beach County's 2000 punch cards are well-traveled. The ballots were taken from their 531 precincts to the old elections office in downtown West Palm Beach. A few days later, they were hauled to the Emergency Operations Center on Military Trail for a hand recount. During the post-recount litigation in Tallahassee, the ballots were loaded onto a rented Ryder truck (now the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question) and driven to the state capital by county Voting Systems Manager Tony Enos. Helicopters carrying TV cameras hovered overhead to record Enos' trek.

After the election was decided in December 2000, the ballots were quietly driven back to the elections office in West Palm Beach by another elections employee, Jay Estabrook, in another Ryder truck. The ballots made another little-noticed move in 2001 when the elections office moved to its new headquarters near the Emergency Operations Center.

The 2000 ballots and other materials share warehouse space with precinct maps, voter registration applications and voter records going back to the 1930s. In one corner of the warehouse are stacks of precinct register books going back at least as far as 1914.

Whether they are archived or destroyed, LePore won't miss the 2000 election materials. The election brought LePore unwanted international fame after she designed a two-page listing of presidential candidates that confused some voters. Democrats claim LePore's ballot design cost Al Gore the election.

LePore was recently asked what she'd like to do with the 2000 ballots.

"Do you have to ask?" she replied. She paused briefly, then offered her own suggestion: "A big bonfire."

the article at the Palm Beach Post Website

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