Outdated gear casts doubts on Ohio's vote
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Scott Hiaasen and Julie Carr Smyth Cleveland Plain Dealer
Plain Dealer Reporters

In the four years since a batch of Florida chads nearly unhinged the republic, politicians from Washington to Columbus have promised to overhaul the nation's voting systems and ensure that every vote counts.

So will Ohio be any better at counting votes in this year's presidential election? 
 The short answer: No.

Most Ohio voters who go to the polls on Nov. 2 will see the same outdated punch-card machines they saw four years ago the very machines blasted by politicians as antiquated, unreliable and error-prone.

Even Ohio's top elections official, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, warned in a letter to the Senate president that "the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity."

Nearly three-quarters of Ohio voters will cast ballots on the punch-card machines that were so vilified after the tortured recount of 2000, when George W. Bush squeaked by Al Gore in Florida. More than 175,000 votes in that state went uncounted because of errors with the ballots.

Ohio had a similar problem: It scrapped about 94,000 votes for president because machines couldn't read the ballots and nearly 89 percent of those "spoiled" ballots were cast on punch cards. The state's lost votes got little attention at the time because Bush defeated Gore in Ohio by more than 166,000 votes.

But every vote will be critical in Ohio if this year's election is a dead heat. Indeed, pollsters, pundits and even Gov. Bob Taft have portrayed Ohio as the Florida of 2004, the swing state of swing states that could decide the presidential election.

The odds of seeing those dreaded "hanging chads" again are greatest in Cuyahoga County, where more than 580,000 voters are expected to cast punch-card ballots this fall and where more than 15,000 flawed presidential votes were discounted in the last election.

"It's disgraceful that Ohio hasn't succeeded in replacing its hanging-chad punch-card machines," said Dan Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor and civil rights lawyer. "We could lose upwards of 50,000 votes as a result of this, which could very well spell the difference between victory and defeat."

Although Blackwell has led Ohio's crusade to get rid of punch cards, he says he is confident the Nov. 2 election will go smoothly, even if it's close.

"We fully expect it to go off without a hitch," said his spokesman, Carlo LoParo. "We know that the punch card is prone to error, so we have a responsibility as elections officials to mount a very aggressive voter-education campaign, and we plan to do so."

Punch cards prone

to invalid votes

The problem with punch cards is that they tend to record more "spoiled" ballots than other technologies. If a voter doesn't punch through the ballot hard enough, the hanging flap of paper (that infamous "chad") can cover the hole in the ballot, and the vote is not counted by a machine. This is called an "undervote."

Punch cards also result in more accidental "overvotes" cases where voters punched holes for more than one candidate which also don't count. Some voting machines, such as the electronic machines Ohio eventually plans to buy, prevent overvoting.

In the 2000 election, 2.3 percent of the state's punch-card ballots were discounted, compared with 0.9 percent of votes cast on electronic machines. (A "spoiled" vote for president does not mean the entire ballot is tossed. Valid votes for other candidates or issues still count).

Only two Ohio counties have replaced their punch-card machines in the last four years, leaving 68 counties with the old equipment. Nationwide, nearly 20 percent of voters will rely on punch cards again for this election.

Blackwell has said publicly that punch cards can't meet the accuracy standards set out in the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, the federal law intended to prevent a repeat of the 2000 contest.

Hoping to avoid a similar calamity in 2004, Congress passed HAVA in 2002 and set aside nearly $4 billion for states to upgrade their voting equipment. Some states have already dumped their punch cards most notably Florida and California but most, like Ohio, are waiting until 2006.

New machines delayed

by security concerns

Blackwell planned to replace Ohio's punch-card systems before this year's election. But the plan was delayed by potential security flaws found in electronic voting machines and a subsequent outcry demanding paper records to verify the vote count on the new touch-screen machines.

Catherine Turcer, campaign finance reform director for Ohio Citizen Action, said voters have not forgotten Florida but were alarmed almost into a frenzy over the security risks associated with electronic touch-screens.

"I really thought that the implementation of a whole new [electronic] system, all new machines, in a presidential election year, could have been a horrible situation," she said. "So Ohio is really between a rock and a hard place."

The areas of greatest concern, according to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging punch cards, are the state's poor and minority neighborhoods, which lose more punch- card votes than other communities.

The ACLU argues that punch cards are unconstitutional because their higher error rate means the state gives more weight to votes cast on more reliable devices, a charge that state officials have denied. The dispute is scheduled to resume on Sept. 30 in federal court in Akron.

An ACLU study of the 2000 presidential votes in Summit and Hamilton counties found that overvotes were more than five times more likely in largely black precincts, and undervotes were two times more likely in black precincts.

"In a close election, that's going to make all the difference in the world," said Paul Moke, an ACLU lawyer and a political sci ence professor at Wilmington College.

Cuyahoga County's 15,691 discounted votes for president in 2000 were the most in the state. Black neighborhoods on Cleveland's East Side had some of the highest rates of discarded votes, with as many as 6.5 percent of the votes thrown out in some wards.

In fact, Cuyahoga County had more discounted votes than Broward County, Fla., one of the counties where Gore demanded a recount in 2000.

Elections officials caution that not every discounted vote is a mistake. Some voters intentionally decline to choose a candidate; and some deliberately two candidates, even though it invalidates the vote.

"Some people get a ballot and don't vote a single race," said Jean Burklo, the elections direc tor in Auglaize County.

However, both state and local elections officials plan to educate voters and poll workers before November to prevent every possible error.

Blackwell's office will roll out a statewide voter education effort in mid-September, which will include television ads and newspaper s explaining proper voting procedures.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections plans to send a how-to flier to county voters with instructions on how to use a punch-card ballot, said Director Michael Vu. He also plans to post signs in every polling place telling voters how to use punch cards and letting them know they can ask for a new ballot if they think they made a mistake.

In addition to its traditional 6,000 poll workers, the county plans to hire about 300 inspectors to roam among polling places looking for problems an increase of 100 inspectors from prior years. The new workers and voter-education programs are expected to cost as much as $300,000, Vu said.

In Summit County, elections officials have upgraded their computers and added 10 phone lines to handle more calls from voters on Election Day, said Bryan Williams, director of the elections board. Summit also will offer a new Web site for voters to verify their registration and polling places.

Becky Vollmer, spokeswoman for Election Systems & Software, one of Ohio's top providers of punch-card voting machines, said the company is confident the election will go well.

"Certainly, our goal is to make voting systems that are as reliable, accurate and secure as possible," she said.

Election officials trying

to avoid other mistakes

Voting machines aside, Florida also illustrated how seemingly mundane procedures can create a minor crisis in a close election.

So the new federal Election Assistance Commission now offers advice on how to design a voter- friendly ballot, such as avoiding the "butterfly" design that encouraged double-voting in Florida. Vu has taken it a step further in Cuyahoga County by using only block letters on the ballots, making them easier for the elderly to read.

In recent years, election offices around Ohio have not been immune to the kinds of problems that caused outrage four years ago.

For example, officials in Summit County recently discovered a box of absentee ballots that went uncounted in the March primary. In Lucas County, 300 ballots were misplaced after a March election, and dozens of people voted twice by absentee ballot.

In 2001, election officials in Miami County ran out of ballots in more than two dozen precincts. The same thing happened in 30 Cuyahoga County precincts in the 2000 primary.

For this year's presidential election, local officials plan to be extra cautious to avoid mistakes. The Florida debacle taught them a lasting lesson.

"In a close election," Williams said, "everything matters."