Carolina voters suffer from an old voting law

By THOMAS HARGROVE
Scripps Howard News Service
September 22, 2004

- Tens of thousands of voters in North Carolina and South Carolina routinely lose their votes for president because state laws prevent straight-ticket voting in White House races.

Top election officials in both states blame the laws, passed in the 1960s to protect local Democratic politicians from increasingly GOP-oriented Southern voters, for an unusually large number of ballots that don't register a vote for president.

Voters in North Carolina and South Carolina who have indicated they want to only Democrats or Republicans for state and local offices must also a presidential candidate if their choice is to count.

"That law is confusing. It's something we've been trying to resolve for many years," said Marci Andino, executive director of the South Carolina Election Commission.

Election experts say they know of no other states with such a law.

Gary Bartlett, director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, estimates the law is responsible for at least one-third of the 100,974 ballots in his state that did not register a vote in the 2000 presidential race. "That's what puts North Carolina into such a high category for the off vote," Bartlett said.

The two states suffered among the nation's worst rates among voters who did not cast a vote for president four years ago. North Carolina voters cast 3,015,964 ballots, but only 2,914,990 votes were counted for president. South Carolinians cast 1,433,533 ballots, but only 1,382,721 presidential votes were certified.

Only about 96.6 percent of the ballots registered a presidential vote in the two states. By comparison, the troubled votes in Florida included 97.1 percent of ballots that recorded a presidential vote.

Robert Montjoy, professor of public administration at the University of New Orleans, has extensively studied North Carolina's lack of presidential votes and concludes that it's "certainly a reasonable conclusion" that the straight-ticket vote law is responsible for much of the problem.

"There are some things we can rule out," Montjoy said. "We aren't dealing with incompetent administration, based upon my knowledge of the people in North Carolina. And it isn't the voting equipment because the state had a lower reliance upon punch card balloting than was the national average. So something else is going on there."

Election officials in both states said they are uncertain why the laws were written. But Montjoy said he believes the legislation was intended to isolate presidential politics from the rest of the ballot. Voters in both states tended to vote solidly Democratic in state and local races in the '60s even as they increasingly favored Republicans for president.

Brookings Institution political scholar Stephen Hess agreed. "The motive was to protect the so-called 'courthouse' crowd from an increasingly overwhelming Republican vote for president," he said. "Most local offices then were still in Democratic control."

Both Andino and Bartlett said they have had little luck convincing their state legislatures to repeal the laws. But both states plan to reduce the undervote for president in the Nov. 2 presidential election.

In South Carolina, voters who use electronic machines will be exempt from the law.

"Come this November, 88 percent of voters will be using new electronic voting machines, which are not covered by the law," Andino said. Only one county, Sumter, will still have punch-card balloting, which produced the largest number of ballots without a presidential vote in 2000.

North Carolina is counting on new directions to polling workers to warn voters about the law.

"We're hoping these added instructions will help," Bartlett said. "Every vote will be given verbal instructions, along with a sample ballot, to explain that they must vote for president separately."