On Election Day, no guarantee your vote will count

By MICHAEL COLLINS and THOMAS HARGROVE
Scripps Howard News Service
October 27, 2004

- An unsettling truth hangs over democracy in America as the divided nation prepares to elect its next president: When millions of voters cast their ballots on Nov. 2, there is no guarantee their vote will count.

A year-long investigation by Scripps Howard News Service found that, four years after voting irregularities in Florida led to urgent calls for electoral reform, the mechanics of democracy are still beset with serious flaws that may once again leave the outcome of the presidential race in doubt.

"Florida showed for the first time the fragile nature of election administration," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc., an election consulting firm and a frequent expert witness in court on balloting procedures.

"The system still has problems. Once you let go of your vote, Lord knows what happens to it."

Next week, one out of every four voters will face the same election machines - some more than 40 years old - and unreliable counting procedures that botched the presidential race in Florida four years ago.

An estimated 12 million voters - an eighth of the nation's electorate - are expected to use punch cards on machines that often are bewildering and can lead to errors that invalidate votes in major races.

Election officials increasingly fail to keep track of millions of voters who die or change their address. The problem is so widespread that 261 counties certified more voters than their actual adult population during the 2000 presidential race. There is little evidence that significant improvements have been made in the four years since.

More worrisome, perhaps, are the unknown number of people who are not on the official rolls because of errors by election officials. In a survey of 800 registered voters conducted this summer by Scripps Howard and Ohio University, 3 percent said they have been denied ballots at least once because of registration problems.

"This survey describes the tip of the iceberg. We have some real issues, some real problems with voter confidence," said Deforest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The commission was created by Congress to fix the voting problems discovered in Florida four years ago.

Outrage over the voting errors in Florida has led to some reforms.

The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, was supposed to enable states to replace outdated voting machines and enact new voting procedures. And some progress has been made.

This year, for example, federal law guarantees that every registered voter in America has the right to cast a ballot, regardless of whether his or her name appears on the official voter registration list. Voters whose names are not on the registration roster can request a "provisional ballot" and election officials will decide whether it is counted after verifying the voter's eligibility.

But slow action by Congress, a series of bureaucratic blunders and foot-dragging by many local election officials, have delayed one of the law's chief objectives - the modernization of voting equipment.

The result: 576 counties in 27 states are expected to use punch-card and lever-machine voting equipment during next week's presidential election. In the battleground state of Ohio, voters in 68 of 88 counties will cast ballots on punch-card machines.

"This has certainly been frustrating," said Kay Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States. "We're very concerned that we will face problems again."

In the 2000 presidential election, at least 1.6 million ballots - nearly 2 percent of the vote - did not register a vote for president, according to a Scripps Howard study of official election returns.

Sometimes the voter chose not to cast a ballot for George W. Bush, Al Gore or any other candidate for president. But more often, local election officials found antiquated voting equipment, mechanical failures, improperly programmed tabulation devices and faulty accounting methods were to blame.

This year, the country's top election officials promise to scrutinize election returns like never before in hopes of avoiding a repeat of the problems four years ago.

Every state except Pennsylvania plans to count how many ballots are cast. Elections officials in a dozen states - Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin - did not report how many ballots were cast four years ago.

Their change of heart will make it easier to determine how many votes are lost this year because of inaccurate counting machines or tabulation errors.

"This is a very important statistic because it would throw up a red flag if something is amiss," said Alabama Secretary of State Nancy Worley. "Then we might go back and re-examine the whole counting process. Did something malfunction? Was there some glitch somewhere?"

Next month, the Election Assistance Commission also will begin the nation's first search for missing votes. And more states are promising this year to compare the number of ballots cast against the number of votes counted - an important step, elections experts say, toward repairing the credibility of the electoral process.

Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia compared the number of ballots cast against the number of votes counted in the 2000 presidential election, according to a Scripps Howard survey of all top state elections officials.

This year, 42 states and the District of Columbia have promised to conduct a study of missing votes next month.

States that didn't look for missing votes four years ago had a 39 percent higher rate of ballots failing to record votes in major races like president or governor, according to the Scripps Howard study. In a close election, the missing votes could determine who wins the race.

Despite the promise of better election oversight this year, officials in a few states, including those suffering the nation's worst problems in 2000, say election supervision is essentially a local matter and that missing votes do not necessarily prove something is wrong.

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, for example, said her office will not be gathering the necessary information from county governments to look for missing votes in this year's election. "We don't receive any of that information at the state level. That's all local," she said.

A close look at how elections are administered in some parts of the country points out the defects in the system:

- In Grant County, Ore., only 93 percent of ballots cast during the 2000 election recorded a vote for president. Deputy Secretary of State Paddy McGuire was curious about what happened to the missing 290 votes, so he called Grant County officials.

"The answer I got was that there was a very hot local race, a sheriff's race," McGuire said. "People were voting for that and not for president. Grant County is the kind of place where all politics is really, really, really local."

The only problem was the sheriff's race wasn't hot at all. One of the candidates, incumbent Fred Reusser, had died of a heart attack a week before Election Day, so challenger Glenn Palmer won. In fact, county records showed that no race in Grant County got more than 93 percent of the ballots.

"I just don't know how this could have happened," said Grant County Clerk Kathy McKinnon.

- In Sumter County, S.C., an unraveled paper clip is a vital tool for preserving democracy. Voters in the county cast their ballots on punch cards, which often arrive at the county courthouse so bent, battered or torn that they cannot be read by ballot-counting machines. Elections officials use the paper clip to make duplicates of the unreadable ballots and then feed the copies into the counting machines.

"This isn't rocket science," County Elections Commissioner Lucinda Macias said. "They'd never go through the machine like that. So we just duplicate them. And, hopefully, they will go through."

- In Kershaw County, S.C., democracy runs smoothly thanks in large part to the iron-fisted will of Kerry Morgan, a computer operator for the local school system and a part-time tabulator for county elections.

Ballot-card readers easily jam under humid conditions or when ballots are printed on thick cardboard or are dyed different colors. To keep the machine - and democracy - from grinding to a halt, Morgan stands over the ballot-card reader and pounds the top of it with his fist to prevent the ballots from jamming.

"I'm always afraid something will go wrong," he said.

- Pulaski County, Ill., is a testament to the inherent flaws of punch-card ballots. A Scripps Howard analysis of punch cards cast in the county two years ago showed dozens of invalidating mistakes - errors that could have been avoided with new technologies like touch-screen electronic voting or optically scanned balloting, election experts say.

Dozens of voters punched too many holes into the ballots; punched holes unrelated to any candidate; failed to remove all of the so-called hanging chads; or left deep dimples on their ballots that tabulation machines cannot read.

No one was more surprised by the balloting errors than Pulaski County Clerk Tanna Goins, who has held the office for 10 years but has never made a ballot-by-ballot inspection.

"God knows why they are doing this," Goins said of the voters' errors. "I certainly don't."

- Even state-of-the-art voting machines, like touch-screen electronic voting, are far from fail-safe, as California grape-grower Natalie Schmitt discovered during the state's March 2 primaries.

"I put that plastic card they gave me into the machine. Then I noticed some of the candidates names were missing on the screen," said Schmitt, who lives in Canyon, Calif. "They gave me a new card, I put it in, and the machine froze up completely."

After Schmitt was given a third magnetic card, the voting machine appeared to work. "But, to be honest," Schmitt said, "I don't really think my vote was counted right."

Electoral excellence can be found in some unexpected corners of America. Few ballots are miscounted in Baltimore's gritty inner city, where people are more likely to be impoverished than college educated. Even fewer votes go missing in the bayous of Louisiana, where political corruption is legendary.

But, "nationwide, the system still has three flat tires," said Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox. "A lot of people are keeping their heads in the sand about this."