Are we ready for a close race?
Friday, September 24, 2004
BY PETER L. DeCOURSEY
Of The Patriot-News

Top state Republicans and Democrats fear that judges, not voters, could ultimately decide the Pennsylvania presidential election.

Dreading a potential recount that might have national repercussions, as Florida's did in 2000, both sides are recruiting battalions of poll watchers and lawyers to gird themselves for a court battle over the results.

"I stay up at nights, wondering, if we have a close election, will we know who really won? I am not sure," said Don Morabito, executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee. "It keeps me from sleeping."

Why are Morabito and top GOP officials worried?

Four years after the Florida voting debacle and three years after Pennsylvania's major parties called on many counties to upgrade voting machines, few have done so.

Party activists know that 20,000 Florida ballots were discarded in 2000, and President Bush won that presidency-clinching state by 257 votes.

They also remember that less than a year ago, Superior Court Judge Susan Gantman edged Democratic opponent John J. Driscoll by 28 votes out of more than 2 million cast. That was after the GOP persuaded state courts to invalidate hundreds of ballots.

But predictions of the danger spots differ. Some have faith in the state's voting methods.

"I think that from a voting machine perspective, nobody expects a big problem," said Josh Wilson, political director of the Republican State Committee. "As we saw in the Superior Court election in 2003, the machines worked fine.

"What we are worried about is the absentee votes and that kind of ballot which was the cause of the dispute in 2003," Wilson said.

Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, Pennsylvania's top elections official, says the state has nearly finished its "quality assurance checks" of all 67 county election boards.

"I am confident that if it's a close election, we will be able, with a very reasonable degree of certainty, to say that the person we say got the most votes did get the most votes," Cortes said.

To further reassure voters, Gov. Ed Rendell this week formally proposed an automatic recount law he believes can be enacted in time for this election.

It would trigger an automatic recount in any election where the margin was less than one-half of 1 percent. Since nearly 5 million Pennsylvanians are expected to vote on Nov. 2, the proposed automatic recount would be triggered if the margin of victory was less than 25,000 votes.

Such a scenario is not far-fetched. The latest Keystone Poll of likely voters, released last week, shows a virtual tie in the presidential election in Pennsylvania, with Bush and Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry each receiving 49 percent.

The poll's margin of error is 4.4 percentage points.

Senate Republicans are supporting Rendell's proposal, but House Republican leaders doubt that they will pass the measure in time for it to be implemented for this year's election.

Touch-screen controversy:

Making the upgrade to new voting machines for almost half of Pennsylvania voters remains a goal for Cortes and top Democratic and Republican officials.

Gov. Tom Ridge's Election Modernization Commission reached a bipartisan consensus in 2001, endorsing upgrades of outmoded voting machines.

But the state and counties shied away from the cost, and $100 million in federal money for counties to buy the machines didn't arrive until June. By the time the money arrived, new questions had arisen.

Electronic touch-screen machines, like those used in Dauphin County and Philadelphia, were expected to be the system to which all counties would upgrade, Cortes said. But this year, California's election bureau reversed that trend.

They halted purchasing that voting system because it does not print out ballots that can be audited during a recount. Since touch-screen electronic machines are feared to be vulnerable to computer hackers or human tampering, independent verification of each vote is vital, California officials said.

When California hopped off the electronic machine bandwagon over this issue, other states, including Pennsylvania, stepped back, as well.

"Until we know what kinds of machines will be acceptable under the federal law, we can't recommend any county upgrade," Cortes said. "In Pennsylvania, we would rather be right than be first, in such an expensive project."

Counties that use much-criticized balloting systems, such as punch cards, or confusing two-sided ballots, also wanted to wait for federal money since the cost of machines is double or triple their annual elections budgets.

"Why shouldn't they wait for federal funding for this, since they know we have it?" asked Cortes.

Accuracy questions:

Midstate election officials still dispute the need for new voting machines. Most said their current machines are accurate.

County commissioners in Cumberland, York, Lebanon and Perry counties whose voting systems were recommended for extinction by Ridge's commission said they had higher budget priorities.

But a leading expert on voter machine accuracy, Kimball Brace of Election Data Services in Washington, D.C., says Pennsylvania can't know how accurate its machines are. Unlike 40 other states, Pennsylvania doesn't require counties to report how many voters went to the polls.

Without that number, said Brace, no one can check the number of ballots cast for president against the number of total voters to review if any machine recorded a suspiciously high or low total. In 2001, only nine counties tracked this number.

Cortes said the Rendell administration supports a new state law mandating counties collect and report total voters. Cortes also said his department has increased the number of counties reporting and tracking that number to more than two-thirds.

Key battlefields:

But Morabito and Wilson say that it is too late to worry about machine upgrades that won't happen in time for the presidential election.

Both said their parties would train volunteers and lawyers to monitor polling places, review absentee ballots and enforce a photo ID requirement for new voters. Voters who lacked ID or were otherwise challenged would then cast a provisional ballot that would be counted if the voter is determined to be eligible.

In a close election, ballot law experts said, in addition to any machine errors that crop up, absentee and provisional ballots will be the key battlefields, and lawyers will be the combatants.