Scripps Howard News
Service
Quarter of voters will use unreliable machines
By Thomas Hargrove
June 21, 2004
- One out of every four voters in November will face the same election
machines - some more than 40 years old - and unreliable counting procedures that
botched the presidential race in Florida four years ago.
Slow action by Congress, a series of bureaucratic blunders and foot-dragging by
many local election officials mean that 575 counties in 27 states are expected
to use punch-card and lever-machine voting equipment for at least one more
presidential election.
Congress hoped to eliminate most of these machines before November's
election. But slower-than-expected modernization of voting equipment is
clouding hopes for a clear decision in the 2004 race.
"This certainly has been frustrating," said Kay Maxwell, president of
the
League of Women Voters of the United States. "We're very concerned that we
will face problems again. The likelihood of another close election in November
is quite high."
Flaws in counting the 2000 general election were much more widespread than was
generally known at the time. At least 1.6 million ballots cast in 38 states did
not register a vote for president, according to a study of
officially certified election returns by Scripps Howard News Service.
Nearly 1.1 million of these so-called "undervotes" were cast on easily
damaged cardboard punch cards or mechanical counting devices, some of which date
to the early 1960s.
Fewer than half of the 105.4 million voters in the last presidential
election used these aging machines, but they accounted for two-thirds of
the known undervote.
Several state and local election officials said they are anxious to upgrade
to more state-of-the-art electronic touch-screen voting machines or to
optically scanned ballot systems.
"These delays are killing us," said Cook County, Ill., Clerk David
Orr.
"The people want change. But Congress and the White House moved so darned
slow on this."
Chicago-area voters suffered the nation's worst single-county tabulation
error in the 2000 election, according to the Scripps Howard study. Orr said he
blames poorly manufactured punch-card equipment for "the vast
majority" of the 122,914 Cook County ballots that did not register a
presidential vote.
"This is tough stuff. A lot of people don't understand the complexity of
counting votes. I applaud the reforms that Congress passed. But the
delays!" said Orr. "It was politics as usual in Washington that
resulted in
many of these delays."
At issue is the speed with which Congress and the federal bureaucracy
implemented the Help America Vote Act intended to pump nearly $3.9 billion into
broad reforms over three years. President Bush signed the bill on Oct. 29, 2002,
following public outcry at the uncertainties caused by Florida's 178,145-ballot
statewide undervote.
The act was landmark legislation - Congress had never before invested
directly in local election administration. The bill immediately authorized
$325 million for states to replace punch-card and lever voting machines.
The act also required that a four-member U.S. Election Assistance
Commission be named within 120 days to allocate the funds, a self-imposed
deadline that Congress missed badly. Democratic and Republican leaders did not
formally present their nominees to the new commission until Oct. 3, 2003, eight
months past the deadline. The nominees were finally approved by the Senate on
Dec. 9, 2003 - 406 days after passage of the law.
Then, the newly sworn-in commissioners learned that Congress had not given them
an operating budget, so they couldn't meet the new law's stipulation that state
reform plans be published in the Federal Register.
"That meant there was $2.3 billion in funding without any mechanism for its
release to the states," said DeForest Soaries Jr., the first chairman of
the Election Assistance Commission.
"I put the blame on both Congress and the White House," said Kimball
Brace, president of the consulting firm Election Data Services Inc. and a legal
expert on balloting procedures. "Unfortunately, this is likely to haunt us
all come November."
Brace's company, which monitors election equipment in every county,
estimates punch cards will still be used this year in 305 counties, areas
that had 12.1 million voters in 2000. Mechanical counting machines will
still be employed in 270 counties with 13.5 million voters.
The Election Assistance Commission began disbursing federal funding for
election reforms by spring this year, giving many state and local
governments just six months to make extensive changes in the complicated
mechanics of elections.
"Seventy-four percent of the American people will be voting on the exact
same equipment that they used in 2000. We know that," Soaries said.
"Our job is to respond to reality. Whatever voting devices are in use come
November, we must identify the best practices and procedures for each kind of
machine."
There is widespread agreement among election officials that delays in
establishing and funding the commission have drastically slowed election
reform.
"If the money had gone out smoother? If the commission had put together
some voting standards sooner? Yeah, I think we would be in a much different
place as a nation right now," said Leslie Reynolds, executive director of
the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Meanwhile, many local election officials are resisting suggestions that
they change from their decades-old associations with punch cards and
mechanical counting machines.
Dozens of county election officials contacted in an ongoing study of 2000
election returns by Scripps Howard concede they never compare the number of
ballots cast against the number of votes counted. Since they do not know that
they suffer chronic undervoting, they see little reason to change their election
machinery.
When Thad Cobb, chairman of the Kershaw County, S.C., Commission of Registration
and Elections, was told of his county's 8 percent undervote for president, he
replied, "I didn't know we had an undercount."
Many officials defend their election results and complain bitterly about
the cost of upgrading to new voting equipment.
After being told that her county's undervote stood at 9 percent, four times the
national average, Hardin County, Ill., Clerk Mary Ellen Denton rejected
suggestions that there was a problem. "That may be your averages and
statistics. But I'm not worried about that. I don't think there was any problem
with our machines," she said.
Denton complained that new optical scanning equipment would cost about $45,000
and Hardin County's share of the funds from the Help America Vote Act would only
be $22,344.
"Where am I going to get the other $20,000? I'll have to borrow it from the
bank. I'll have to use the fund I have for computer equipment in my
office," she said. "All of this is a handicapping the smaller counties
like
mine. We run barebones anyway."
Expected to have at least one county with outdated devices are Arkansas,
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North
Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia,
Washington state, West Virginia and Wyoming.
|