Florida's top elections official under fire on two fronts

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2. We have to make sure our local Supervisors of Elections are trustworthy

I'm a native of Florida and except for the 1972 election (when I voted absentee in Polk County) I have voted in Leon County. We are very lucky here - we have Ion Sancho as our Supervisor. He fights for fair elections that can be documented.

But before Ion got elected, we had a clusterfuck election. One year the long time supervisor decided on the afternoon of the last day of filing that she would retire immediately after that election. The only person who had an opportunity to file as a candidate was her son who had been working in the office (nepotism, anyone). No one bothered to run against him as a write in. They didn't realize how essential the Supervisor of Elections office was and assumed that since the man had been working in the office for over ten years, he was competent to take over the office from his mother.

Wrong and even MORE WRONG! The next election, the first he ran on his own, was a disaster. Back then, we used the old lever machines. He did not make sure that the ballots were lined up properly or that the levers worked properly. Well before the end of the day voters complained that their votes had not gone through or that they had registered for the incorrect candidates.

There were lawsuits, acrimonious editorials and outrage all over the place. Ion Sancho ran against the incompetent son of a supervisor and won hands down. Ion's main campaign promise was to have easy to check, fair elections. He bought all new machines - optical scanners that scan paper ballots. The machines were programmed to kick out ballots that showed over and under votes or that were unreadable. That was in the 1988.

In 2000 Leon County was one of the few Florida counties with no election problems. Sancho was chosen to lead the recount in Miami-Dade County and advised Gadsden County on how to reprogram their optical scanners to sort out bad ballots. Since then, Sancho has gotten in trouble by working with activists to see how optical scanners could be hacked (see the movie "Hacking Democracy&quot .

So long as Ion Sancho is our Supervisor of Elections I will have confidence that my vote will be counted. I dread when he retires and hope than when he does he will endorse a well trained successor to take his place.

If every Supervisor of Elections were as competent and honest as Ion Sancho we could all concentrate on forcing our legislators to create fair districts!