The machinery of democracy in America is more broken
than many state and local election officials know or
will admit.
In the 2000 election, at least 1,605,263 reported
ballots did not register a vote for president, according
to a study of official election returns by Scripps
Howard News Service. Sometimes the voter chose not to
cast a ballot for George W. Bush, Al Gore or any other
candidate for president. But more often, local election
officials found antiquated voting equipment, mechanical
failures, improperly programmed tabulation devices and
faulty accounting methods accounted for the undervote.
"Nationwide, the system still has three flat
tires," said Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox.
"A lot of people are keeping their heads in the
sand about this."
Florida drew worldwide attention four years ago when
178,145 ballots were not counted in the presidential
race, mostly because of poor ballot design and disputed
punch-card votes. The Scripps Howard study found that
seven states and 544 individual counties exceeded
Florida's 2.9 percent undervote in their certified
election results. The states were Georgia, Idaho,
Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and
Wyoming.
Most of these were not challenged by politicians or
given attention by the news media.
"Florida showed for the first time the fragile
nature of election administration," said Kimball
Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc, an
election consulting firm, and a frequent expert witness
in court on balloting procedures. "The system still
has problems. Once you let go of your vote, Lord knows
what happens to it."
Several state and local voting officials contacted
for this story denied _ sometimes angrily _ that there
might be anything wrong with a rate of undervoting that
was two, three or four times greater than Florida's in
the 2000 general election.
"A voter not voting in a race is commonplace.
Commonplace!" Oregon State Elections Director John
Lindback said emphatically. "There's been a lot of
bad reporting on this issue. People don't vote for races
all the time because they don't know who to vote
for."
But in a later conversation, Lindback said he is at a
loss to explain why 7 percent of the voters in Grant
County, Ore., did not vote for president in 2000 or why
more than 10 percent of ballots in Klamath County, Ore.,
were invalidated in 1996 because voters reportedly
selected more than one presidential candidate.
"This suggests the machines were not (correctly)
reading the ballots," Lindback said. "It
should be raising the eyebrows of people like me."
Because ballots have since been destroyed, the 2,885
questionable votes in the two Oregon counties cannot be
confirmed. Local election officials still defend the
results.
"I don't know what to tell you. Strange things
happen in elections," said Klamath County Clerk
Linda Smith.
The most common means of detecting erroneous tallies
is by comparing the total vote in high-profile races for
president, U.S. senator or state governor against the
number of ballots cast. Election experts say that state
and local officials should be suspicious when an
undervote exceeds 2 percent in such races.
Twelve states did not report the number of ballots
cast in the 2000 general election, making any check of
undervoting impossible. They were Alabama, Arkansas,
Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri,
Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.
There is no federal law that requires such reports.
The Scripps Howard study also found dozens of
counties that made significant mistakes in counting the
number of voters who went to the polls in 2000.
Thirty-six counties reported more votes for president
than actual ballots cast.
Two officials corrected their tallies after they were
contacted for this story.
"It's been four years and we've given these
figures out Lord knows how many times. But this is the
first time that this was ever caught," conceded
Cindy Moore, deputy elections officer of Reno County,
Kan., which made a 3,176-vote error in reporting the
number of ballots cast in the presidential race.
"I'm absolutely confident the candidate totals
are correct. But we had a programming error for our
optical scanner and some (of the ballots cast) got
counted twice," she said.
Most of the suspiciously high undervotes, however,
appear to be incorrectly tabulated ballots. The prime
suspects in many of these were the voting machines, the
study found.
Georgia's 159 counties had an average undervote of 5
percent, the highest in the nation for the 2000
presidential race. Rural Bacon County, for example,
reported 354 of the 3,347 people who cast ballots that
year did not vote for president.
Bacon County Elections Superintendent Joe Boatright
steadfastly defends the 1,000-pound mechanical,
lever-action voting machines his county had used since
the 1970s. "It wasn't the voting machines. We kept
them greased and always checked them a few months before
an election," Boatright said.
He couldn't explain why the undervote _ 9 percent in
1996 and 11 percent in 2000 _ dropped to just 2 percent
in the 2002 U.S. Senate race after the county switched
to new electronic touch-screen voting machines.
"There's no one on the planet can tell you why
there was an undercount then," Boatright said.
Georgia Secretary of State Cox laughed after hearing
of Boatright's remarks: "We used to get panicked
calls from counties with lever-machines on election
night. It happened several times. They'd open the
machines at the end of the day and find nothing but
zeroes inside. Some little wheel had gotten
misaligned."
Cox ordered a re-evaluation of the Georgia vote after
watching the recount in Florida. "What we found
shocked us," she said. "Proportionately,
Georgia had a worse undercount than Florida."
Georgia's undercount for president was 93,991 votes,
or 3.5 percent of all ballots cast. Cox campaigned for
$54 million from the state to purchase 26,000
touch-screen machines, replacing every voting machine in
the state by 2002. The statewide undervote dropped to
17,728 for the U.S. Senate that year, less than 1
percent of all ballots cast.
The state with the highest aggregate undervote four
years ago was Illinois, where 4.9 million people voted
but only 4.7 million presidential votes were counted.
The county average was lower than Georgia's because
two-thirds of Illinois' 190,084 undervotes came from
Chicago and its Cook County suburbs.
"The day after the election, we noticed we had
an alarmingly high falloff in the vote," said Scott
Burnham, a spokesman for Cook County Clerk David Orr.
The Illinois Institute of Technology studied the
voting equipment and concluded that poorly manufactured
voting templates _ plastic guides that voters use when
poking their punch cards _ helped contribute to the
122,289 undervotes. More than 6 percent of the 2 million
voters in Cook County failed to register a presidential
vote.
"We trashed all 50,000 of those templates. Now
we have new error-detection technology. And we hope to
have all new voting machines in place by 2006,"
Burnham said. "Prior to the 2000 election, no one
would think to check for chads. Florida changed all that
forever."
There were other large presidential undervotes among
major urban areas. The undervote in Los Angeles was
74,773.
Monmouth County, N.J., reported an undervote of
77,414, but most of that was due to a miscount in the
number of ballots cast, officials said. This error in
counting voters put New Jersey on the list of states
with an undervote greater than Florida's.
The study found there were 10 states that each had an
undervote of less than 1 percent. They were Alaska,
Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode
Island, Louisiana, Nevada and Vermont. Minnesota, for
example, had an undervote of 18,471, just 0.75 percent
of the 2.5 million votes cast.
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