Florida, Ohio Try to Avoid Vote-Count `Fiasco,' Revamp Machines (Bloomberg.com) Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Florida legislators were so determined to avoid a repeat of the disputed 2000 presidential election that they outlawed punch-card ballots the following May and had new voting machines installed throughout the state.

The first test came in the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Poll workers in Miami-Dade and Broward counties shut some voting sites for five hours to start the machines and failed to retrieve hundreds of votes. It took a week to get the results.

``It was a fiasco,'' says Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the nonpartisan Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.

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