Tribune editorial: Election problems persisting

July 26, 2004

The 2000 presidential election showed that voting problems extend far beyond Florida, and despite all the publicity and federal assistance the problems persist in many states.

Four years ago, 12 states did not report — and many didn't even know — how many total ballots were cast for president. The difference between the total ballots cast and the actual votes for each office is called the undervote, and that figure is vital for identifying voting-machine and tabulating problems.

"This is really embarrassing. How can we ever measure the error rate without having the global vote numbers?" asked Deforest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is charged with ensuring that a Florida-like voting snafu doesn't recur.

In a report to the EAC, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project urged that federal voting assistance money be cut off to states that fail to provide on a county-by-county basis such essential information as total ballots and total votes cast and the number of absentee and provisional ballots.

In addition, we would suggest that the requirements also include figures on the number of would-be voters turned away from the polls and why.

Having this kind of basic data is essential to ensuring honest and fair elections.

As Scripps Howard News Service reporters Tom Hargrove and Michael Collins point out in a voting analysis, for all of the flaws in the Florida vote, because the state counted total ballots cast, the extent of the voting problem was known immediately.

Of the 12 states that came up short in 2000:

Indiana and Delaware had the ballots-cast data but just didn't report it, Delaware publicly and Indiana in a timely fashion. Both have promised to remedy those problems this fall. Eight of the 12 — Arkansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — have also promised with varying degrees of certainty and sincerity to provide ballots-cast figures for each county.

Two states — Alabama and Pennsylvania — say they are not in a position to do so.

If basic voting data is missing after November's election, Congress should step in and make the reporting mandatory for federal elections and give the EAC real powers to force its collection.

It's not sure that this nation could endure another Florida.