Touch screens: Levers with a plug

By Tom Blackburn, Palm Beach Post Columnist
Monday, February 23, 2004
The 2000 election in Florida was quickly clich?d as a wake-up call. But, like people trying to make decisions while their brains are fuzzy from sleep, no one answered the call adequately.

Elections supervisors bought touch-screen voting equipment, which makes overvoting voting for two candidates for the same office impossible. But Al Gore chose to make his stand on undervotes votes, apparently, for no candidate. The screens, as we have seen in two elections, make it possible for people to go to the polls, sign in, a card in a computer and not vote. Which leaves unanswerable the question of why they would do that.

U.S. Rep. Rob Wexler, D-Boca Raton, is pushing a legal case to force the supervisors to provide a printout of each vote. That's so there will be something to count if there is a question about the votes recorded by the computers. But under what theory is something produced by a computer more reliable than the computer that produced it?

It's time to get back to what woke everybody up. It was the discovery that many people vote in vain. This was old news to elections supervisors but outrageous to sleepy-headed voters. In Florida, more than 150,000 ballots were ignored because they were read as undervotes or overvotes. That happens in every election in every state. The unchallenged theory was that the faulty votes cancel each other out and usually don't matter.

Florida's count was so close that everything mattered. The rest of the states guffawed at Florida, but their voting systems are no better. Where we blew it was in letting the candidates fight it out over the uncounted votes. No one represented the voters in the 36 days that ended in the Supreme Court as Bush vs. Gore. No one, certainly not Secretary of State Katherine Harris who should have helped Joe and Jane Voter get a dog into the fight.

Mr. Gore focused on undervotes chads that didn't fall in four counties because that's where he thought his votes were. He ignored overvotes, although one and a half ballots were discarded for overvotes for every one discarded for undervoting. Mr. Bush focused on leaving the uncounted votes uncounted. Everyone else focused on the candidates' theories. But everyone else was the voters whose efforts to vote the candidates were fighting over.

The new touch screens eliminate the possibility of overvoting, as could happen if a person saw the names of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney on separate lines and thought he had to punch out two chads to vote for that single ticket. The only way to eliminate the possibility of undervoting, though, is to force the voter to tell us he isn't voting. In general elections, voters skip races, even the presidential race. But we recently saw 137 voters disappear into cyberspace in an election with only two candidates for one state House seat on the ballot, which implies that they didn't care about the race that drew them to the polling place.

We'd know that they meant it if they had had to touch "none of the above" before leaving the screen. "None of the above" is an option in Nevada, but since politicians hate it, and some voters may not want to put it quite so nastily, the option could be phrased neutrally as "I choose to skip this race." Absent such an affirmation of no vote, we always will have mysterious people who take the trouble to go to the polls but apparently not to vote.

And so we always will have the doubts that Rep. Wexler is trying to address. But politicians won't or can't lead us to solutions. The party in power won't talk about problems with elections because it fears such

discussion may taint its glorious victory. And the party out of power always will be suspected of trying to re-rig elections so it can get back in.

When we got the wake-up call, we already had a voting technology that does what the touch-screen computers do. It even had one advantage over computers: Computer dummies could understand it.

Like computers, the old mechanical, lever machines preclude overvotes and can't account for undervotes. They are expensive to store. So are computers. And they have been susceptible to tampering in the past. But if the old lever machines could and, some places, did arrive at precincts with votes already recorded before the polls opened, who is going to read the reams of computer language to see if the new computers have been similarly tampered with? Not election supervisors. Not poll workers.

Computers may facilitate voting chicanery and will increase suspicions of chicanery. Nothing we have done addresses corruption. Meanwhile, at enormous expense, we have addressed the problem of voter error by devising a computer to do the work of a mechanical device we already had.

tom_blackburn@pbpost.com