Something Rotten in the State of Florida

Of the many weird and unsettling developments in Florida since the presidential election meltdown four years ago, none is so startling as the fact that Theresa LePore, the calamitously incompetent elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, still has her job. It was LePore who chose the notorious "butterfly ballot" – a format so confusing that it led thousands of Democrats, many of them elderly, retired Jewish people, to punch the wrong hole, giving their vote not to Al Gore, as they had intended, but to the right-wing, explicitly anti-Jewish fringe candidate Pat Buchanan.

It was LePore, too, who caused huge problems for the fraught re-count process, first by insisting on the strictest standards for determining voter intent and then, with the final deadline 72 hours away, ordering her staff to take the day off for Thanksgiving. As a result, Palm Beach County fell short of completing its manual re-count on time, and the whole process – which even under LePore's strictures had turned up an extra 180 votes for Gore – was rendered void.

Arguably, no one person did more to foul up the maddeningly close election in Florida in 2000, and no individual bears more responsibility for the fact that George Bush ended up President instead of Gore. (Without the butterfly ballot, Gore would have taken as many as 7,000 more votes and cruised past Bush's official 537-vote margin of victory.) Yet Theresa LePore will still be in charge for this November's presidential election – and things have got considerably worse in the interim.

Palm Beach isn't the only place in Florida where crazy things have happened. Officials up and down the state have behaved like drunks caught out on one bender too many. They have talked the talk of reform quite convincingly, and even lavished considerable expense on covering up their past lapses. But the bottom line is that the voting machines still don't work, political corruption and underhand campaign tactics remain rampant, and too many black and lower-income voters face daunting, often insurmountable obstacles in exercising their voting rights.

In a state that promises to be every bit as pivotal as it was last time, this is deeply worrying. And Palm Beach County shows why. After the 2000 débâcle, an unrepentant Theresa LePore was told by the state of Florida that she and her fellow election supervisors would have to replace the punchcard machines that had exposed the state to such ridicule. She flew to California, where she was quickly seduced by an electronic touchscreen voting system used in Riverside County, just east of Los Angeles.

She was told that Riverside's system had performed flawlessly in November 2000, even as she and her canvassing board had been hung up for weeks examining punchcards for dimpled, hanging or pregnant chads. But Riverside's tabulation system had in fact suffered meltdown on election night, creating the first of many controversies about the reliability and accuracy of its Sequoia Pacific machines.

Blissfully unaware of this, LePore spent $14.4m on her own Sequoia system and unveiled it for local elections in March 2002. It seems to have fallen at the first hurdle. A former mayor of Boca Raton, Emil Danciu, was flabbergasted to finish third in a race for a seat on Boca Raton city council. A poll shortly before the election had put him 17 points ahead of his nearest rival.

Supporters told his campaign office that when they tried to touch the screen to light up his name, the machine registered the name of an opponent. Danciu also found that 15 cartridges containing the vote totals from machines in his home precinct had disappeared on election night, delaying the result. It transpired that an election worker had taken them home, in violation of the most basic procedures. Danciu's lawyer, his daughter Charlotte, said some cartridges were then found to be empty, for reasons that have never been adequately explained.