Punch card ballot prevails in Ohio, despite problems

By JAMES DREW  Knox News
October 30, 2004

In February, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell wrote, "With Ohio slated by both national parties as a battleground state, the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity."

  
The use of punch cards in the presidential election of 2000 in Florida had eroded trust in the nation's outdated and inconsistent voting system.

"They unnecessarily disenfranchise some votes," Blackwell said in an interview.

Florida has electronic voting machines for this year's election.

But in Ohio, voters in 68 of 88 counties - roughly 73 percent of voters - will use punch card ballots.

Four years ago, the ballots of nearly 94,000 Ohioans were rejected - nine out of 10 on punch cards - compared to 175,000 in Florida.

But it wasn't an issue in Ohio because George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 166,000 votes.

"The evidence is clear that it's an unreliable system," said Daniel Tokaji, an assistant law professor at Ohio State University.

"Racial minorities are disproportionately affected by it, and it is quite possible that the margin of victory could be less than the margin of error with the punch cards," he said.

The presidential race remains tight in Ohio, recent surveys have shown.

Ohio law requires a recount if the margin is less than 0.25 percent of the vote.

Blackwell said the biggest problem with punch cards is they lead to "double votes," when voters punch holes for more than one candidate.

In public service TV ads, Blackwell instructs voters how to use punch-card ballots. "Inspect your ballot to ensure there are no Florida hanging chads," the ad says.

So how did Ohio end up with so many counties voting on punch cards this election?

In February, 2001, Blackwell held a summit on the debacle in Florida and what Ohio needed to do.

In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology found that punch cards and lever machines produced the highest number of uncounted votes.

The fewest errors came from hand-counted ballots and optical scanners, the study said.

In 2002, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio sued Blackwell over Ohio's use of punch cards, saying the state's antiquated voting technology is unconstitutional because other voting systems are more reliable.

The ACLU found that in Franklin County - which uses touch-screen machines - the percentage of rejected ballots was 0.5 percent, or one-sixth as many as in Summit County, where punch-card ballots are used.

A decision on the lawsuit is not expected until after the election.

The punch card machines also don't meet the accuracy standards required by the federal Help America Vote Act - which Congress adopted in 2002 - because Ohio's system is dependent on a central count in each county instead of a count in each precinct.

"You have to transport something from the precinct to the central count location. Boxes get left behind. Boxes get left in trunks. Boxes get left in the closet," he said.

Blackwell said he wanted counties to switch to precinct-count optical-scan machines, but the Republican-controlled legislature wanted to give counties the power to choose their voting systems.

The Secretary of State's Office identified 57 potential security flaws in electronic voting systems that four companies proposed. Blackwell said those problems could have been fixed, but the legislature also insisted on pieces of paper that voters could use to verify their vote.

The new goal to upgrade Ohio's voting systems is May 2006.