Older devices beat touch-screens’ results in ’02 election, report says

By Jeremy Milarsky
Staff Writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted August 6 2004

Florida's relatively new touch-screen voting machines performed more poorly than older optical-scan machines during the 2002 gubernatorial election, according to a state report.

The report, published in January 2003, was written by officials in the state Division of Elections. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who oversees the division, has been a staunch defender of touch-screen voting machines.

Hood's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Nash, said the difference between optical-scan machines and touch-screen machines is minimal and that when someone casts a blank ballot, they usually do so on purpose.

"You'd have to get in the head of the voter to know a reason why," Nash said. "There's never going to be an election without undervotes."

Officials analyzed the results of the November 2002 election in order to comply with a state law passed the year before. Legislators wanted to get a report of ballots that were flawed and as a result, not counted, from each general election.

Officials were looking for a tally of both "undervotes," ballots in which a candidate is not ed, and "overvotes," those in which more than one candidate is ed. In both cases, the vote is not considered valid and doesn't count.

According to the report, voters using optical scan machines where voters use a pencil to mark a choice on the ballot cast flawed ballots less than half as often as they did in counties using touch-screen machines.

The average undervote rate for counties using the optical scan machines was 0.41 percent. In the optical scan counties, the percentage represented a total of 7,834 undervotes and 689 overvotes. In touch-screen counties, the average rate was 0.93 percent, representing 25,903 undervotes. It is impossible to cast an overvote on a touch-screen machine.

A study published by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel last month found similar results from the March 9 election. Voters participating in the Democratic presidential primary were more than six times more likely to cast flawed ballots if they were doing so from a county using touch-screen machines.

Concerns about touch-screen machines have been growing among the state's body politic. Most recently, Senate candidate Alex Penelas urged his native county, Miami-Dade to switch from using touch-screen machines to optical scan machines. The state report backs up Penelas' concern, said Ion Sancho, Leon County's Supervisor of Elections.

"It is very clear, very precise and it reinforces the Sun-Sentinel's study," Sancho said.

Supporters of touch-screen machines point out that the undervote rate was much higher when many South Florida voters used punch-card voting machines. Those machines were a cornerstone during the controversial 2000 presidential race, in which President Bush defeated former vice president Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes.