Ballots at risk: why voters should be wary

By THOMAS HARGROVE  KnoxNews and Scripps
October 6, 2004

An analysis of punch-card ballots cast in a rural Illinois county two years ago found dozens of invalidating mistakes, signaling pitfalls for voters across America in November's presidential election. 
An estimated 12 million voters - an eighth of the nation's electorate - are expected to use punch cards in next month's balloting on machines that are often bewildering and can lead to errors that invalidate votes in major races.

Scripps Howard News Service counted by hand all 3,124 ballots cast in the 2002 Illinois governor's race in Pulaski County and found that nearly 4 percent of the votes were lost.

Dozens of voters punched too many holes into their ballots, or punched the wrong holes unrelated to any candidate, or failed to remove all of the so-called hanging chads, or left deep dimples on their ballots that tabulation machines cannot read. The names of candidates do not appear on the county's Votomatic-style ballots. Instead there are 228 numbered boxes that voters must punch using a small wire stylus.

"This is certainly something that we are concerned about," Illinois Board of Elections Executive Director Daniel White said after learning of the recount results. "There may be a number of reasons for this including (a lack of) voter education, older voting equipment and, I know, the fact that many counties are strapped for money."

Most of the mistakes would have been prevented by new technologies like touch-screen electronic voting or optically scanned balloting, according to election experts. Both systems prevent people from voting for more than one candidate in each race, for example.

The recount results in Pulaski County are at odds with the reassurances frequently made by state and local election officials that dramatic discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of votes counted in major races for president, governor or U.S. senator are the result of a conscious decision by people to ignore state and national races in favor of local political contests.

Only 93 percent of Pulaski County's ballots registered a presidential vote in 2000 and just 91 percent showed a choice for governor in 2002, trends that were repeated in hundreds of counties throughout the nation.

"It's good to be able to look at the actual ballots. Then you get to see the different scenarios that caused the problems," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services and the chief consultant to the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

"Having looked at this stuff for many, many years, I've seen that when a ballot doesn't have the candidates' names on it, there is a greater likelihood that less-educated people will cast incorrect votes," Brace said.

Although obvious in a ballot-by-ballot visual inspection, the mistakes in Pulaski County went unnoticed by local, state and federal election officials two years ago because no one checks to determine how many votes go missing in major elections. There were more than 500 counties nationwide that reported only 97 percent of the ballots counted in the presidential race four years ago, a so-called "undervote" as bad or worse as the statewide average in Florida that year.

White said his office has never checked to compare the number of ballots cast and counted in Illinois, although he plans to study the undervote in next month's election.

"Unless there are allegations of improprieties, the counties certify the results to us and we certified the results statewide. I don't think we have the legal authority to question the results," White said.

The Election Assistance Commission, created by Congress two years ago to fix Florida-like voting problems, will begin in November the nation's first official search for missing votes. Brace has been hired to create a database showing how many votes were cast in each county in America and how many votes for president were counted.

"We need to flesh out our understanding of what is happening in elections," said commission Chairman DeForest Soaries.

Scripps Howard conducted a recount in Pulaski County as a case study into the kinds of election problems that have plagued hundreds of rural counties in America. Illinois was chosen because it routinely suffers the nation's worst rate of undervoting. Four years ago, 190,084 of its ballots (3.9 percent of all ballots cast) failed to record a presidential vote.

Pulaski County was ed because it suffered one of Illinois' worst rates of undervoting. Access to the ballots was gained through the Freedom of Information Act.

At the beginning of the recount, County Clerk Tanna Goins said she assumed that the undervote in her county was the result of a conscious decision by voters to ignore many races. "A lot of times, our voters will only vote when a candidate asks them for support. They'll vote in the local races only," she said.

The clerk, who has held the office for 10 years, said she has never made a ballot-by-ballot inspection. There seems little need, she said, because punch card ballots are routinely tabulated twice by counting machine to verify results.

During Scripps Howard's three-day recount, Goins was shown many examples of the kinds of mistakes that voters make. Ballot number 1,058, for example, was blank of any punch holes but did show 20 heavy dimples that did not line up near any of the perforated holes.

"I guess he didn't have it in the machine correctly," Goins said. "But he was trying (to vote) wasn't he? Yeah, you got one there."

Ballot number 1,138 showed double punches for many races, as if the voter assumed the correct procedure was to punch holes next to all of the unwanted candidates while leaving the preferred candidate's punch hole untouched.

"That doesn't make any sense, does it? Why would he push for all of them? I mean, look at this," Goins said as she produced a copy of the printed instructions given to voters. "See, it says to 'vote for one' in each race. How much more simple could we have made it?"

Yet 61 voters, or 2 percent of the county's ballots, punched more than one hole in the governor's race. Most of these voted for two candidates, but 12 voted for all four gubernatorial candidates.

Another 36 voters, or slightly more than 1 percent of all ballots cast, punched invalid holes.

These invalid punches are supposed to be unavailable to voters when they their ballots into templates that guide them at the polls. Goins said she assume all of the impossible punches occurred among voters who cast absentee ballots by mail, and therefore had no templates to guide them.

The recount found that more than a third of the apparently missing vote in Pulaski County was the result of errors by people who clearly were trying to vote in the governor's race.

"God knows why they are doing this. I certainly don't," Goins said at the conclusion of the recount. "It's very sad, really. They are making mistakes. I guess they are too embarrassed to ask if they are doing this right."

But the clerk was also quick to note Pulaski County has had difficulty in recruiting and training qualified election judges to work the polls and to educate voters in how to use the punch-card ballots. "We have an election school once a year, and we're lucky if we get even half of them to show up," she said.

When told that many counties make such training session mandatory for poll workers, Goins groaned. "Do you know how hard it is to get election judges here?"

She said Pulaski County also faces severe money shortages. The county owes Fidlar and Chambers Co., the voting equipment firm that prepares the county's ballots and programs its counting machine, $40,000 for elections held in the last two years.

"We are broke. It's been four years since I've gone to a training seminar put on by the state board of elections," she said. "That's our county commissioners' fault because they will not let us go to training sessions unless they are mandatory."

Goins said she has no idea how the county will finance the purchase of new optical-ballot scanners that are mandated to be in place by the 2006 elections.

Voters in Pulaski County said they will be glad to say goodbye to the punch cards.

"No, I won't be sorry to see them go," said Earnestine Johnson, a cashier at Christine's restaurant in Mound City. "Ever since Florida, when I think folks got cheated four years ago, I've thought I'd be glad to get rid of them."

Rene McElrath, a lab technician for Procter and Gamble, said she knows that votes sometimes go missing from her experiences as a former polling official when she lived in Chicago's 37th Precinct during the 1990s.

"This might be mistakes from both ends," said McElrath. "It's probably caused by mistakes by the folks who are voting and mistakes by the people counting."