Making every vote count

The last presidential election put the punch card ballot in the history books and, you would have thought consigned it to history as well.

Features unique to the punch card system dimples, hanging chads and all the rest caused a debacle in Florida that threw the election into the U.S. Supreme Court. It declared George Bush the winner in Florida by just 537 votes.

With the next such election just three months away, it's clear that in Ohio and many other states punch card systems will be widely used again. It's frustrating, but this is the best option available in most communities certainly in Hamilton County.

The fact is, despite all the uproar over the 2000 election and a national push for upgraded voting systems, there is still considerable controversy regarding the electronic voting machines that are widely regarded as the logical successor to punch card systems. At this point, there just isn't time to order and install the new machines and train poll workers and voters to operate them. The better course is to aim for having the new-generation devices in place for the 2005 off-year elections.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Akron abruptly postponed a landmark civil trial aimed at forcing Ohio to do just that.

The trial has garnered national attention because it's the first since the 2000 elections to challenge punch card ballots. It came as a result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against state and local officials in Ohio including the Hamilton County Board of Elections and Hamilton County commissioners.

It's quite true, as the American Civil Liberties Union alleges, that punch card systems are imperfect. Florida voters provided ample proof. Some did not push the stylus all the way through the card, creating the infamous dimples and hanging chads. Some voted for too many candidates for the same office. Some were confused by the "butterfly'' ballots used in some precincts and didn't know which boxes to punch.

But the punch card system, properly administered, works reasonably well. The devil, as ever, is in the details. In Florida, for example, many of the punch cards were made of thin cardboard didn't produce crisp holes when the stylus was applied. And in some key precincts the ballot design was quite confusing.

In Ohio, where punch card ballots are used in 69 of its 88 counties (representing 73 percent of registered voters), nearly 94,000 out of the 4.8 million votes cast in the 2000 presidential election were rejected, mainly because voters had punched too many or too few choices. That's an error rate of just under 2 percent, barely within the margin established as acceptable by a national commission that studied election systems. But in Ohio's punch card counties, the ACLU alleged, the error rate was 2.5 percent, rated as "worrying'' in the national study.

Most electronic voting systems have lower error rates, mainly because the machines won't accept too many choices and alert voters if they make too few ions. But critics have raised concerns about them, mainly the potential for tampering. And some interest groups have launched a national campaign to require verified paper receipts of all electronic votes something many election officials have come to view as an administrative nightmare.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the state's chief elections officer, took a sensible approach to voting reforms in the wake of the Florida election and the subsequent federal law that encourages states to upgrade their voting systems. Ohio elections officials established a set of criteria that all voting systems much meet. (They must, for example, allow a voter to correct errors something the ACLU is pushing for in its lawsuit.)

Most counties with punch card systems have chosen either optical scanning devices or electronic systems. Hamilton County has chosen to replace its punch card system with an electronic one manufactured by Hart InterCivic.

Because of delays some of which came from the General Assembly, some from the national debate over the security of electronic voting systems Blackwell has ped his push to have upgraded system in place for the 2004 elections, but rather will push election boards to install them by 2005. That's prudent.

What that means, of course, is that election officials, and voters, have a big responsibility this year one that could well make Ohio a crucial player in another razor-close presidential election. Election officials in Hamilton County and other punch card counties must ensure that ballots are properly designed and voting procedures are scrupulously observed. And voters must make sure they know what they're doing and ask for help if they don't.