Op-Ed: More Trials and Tribulations for Ohio

1/3/2005 4:29:00 PM

To: Opinion Editor

Contact: Christy Hicks of The Century Foundation, 212-452-7723

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 /U.S. Newswire/ The following is an opinion editorial by Tova Andrea Wang, senior program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation:

More Trials and Tribulations for Ohio

By Tova Andrea Wang

If you thought the advent of 2005 would bring an end to the 2004 vote controversy, think again. Throughout the week, pro- democracy grassroots organizations will be protesting around the country, culminating in a rally at the Capitol on Thursday, the day the votes of the Electoral College are to be counted.

In the meantime, the groups continue the legal battle. Lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, with their support, has filed a motion in an Ohio court challenging the presidential election. The petition argues it is almost statistically impossible for the exit poll data and the actual vote count to have varied so dramatically absent fraud, which the document alleges for the most part was carried out through the manipulation of electronic voting and counting machines.

Whether or not Arnebeck can prove such a case, these allegations of high-tech fraud only serve to distract from the more mundane but critical ways that voting machine problems disenfranchised Ohio voters. And unlike machine tampering, these failures and abuses of the voting system are disturbingly well- documented.

The machine problem in Ohio was two-fold: (1) there weren't enough of them and the breakdown of who did and did not have sufficient machines was extremely suspicious; (2) the overwhelming majority of machines in use were not electronic, but the same old punch cards Florida made notorious in the 2000 election.

The failure to provide a reasonable number of voting machines in Ohio led to lines and wait times to vote that were not just unacceptably high-they were possibly an unconstitutional denial of voting rights. In Ohio, voters had to wait in line for up to ten hours. Thousands of voters were still waiting in line when the polls closed at 7:30 p.m.

How many people decided not to wait?

What makes this more disturbing are emerging revelations of just where the machines were and where they weren't. According to the New York Times, among the 464 complaints about long lines in Ohio collected by the Election Protection Coalition, nearly 400 came from Columbus and Cleveland, where a huge proportion of the state's Democratic voters live. Completely nonsensically, Franklin County election officials in Columbus actually reduced the number of machines in urban precincts and added them in the suburbs this year. An analysis by the Columbus Dispatch showed that predominantly Democratic Franklin County precincts those where Democrat Al Gore got at least 70 percent of the vote in 2000 had 17 fewer machines used in 2004. At the same time, the strongest GOP precincts where George W. Bush got at least 70 percent of the vote four years ago received eight more machines.

The Washington Post reports that the skewed distribution of voting machines was confirmed by the vote count: "After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry. Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits, and turnout was lower than expected"

Adding insult to injury, many of the people stuck in lines due to machine shortage ended up voting on punch card machines. Numerous academic and media studies have demonstrated the poor job punch card voting machines do in counting votes as compared to other technologies, particularly those of African American voters.

So how did punch cards hold up this time around, when 70 percent of Ohioans voted with them? According to a Scripps Howard News Service analysis, nearly 97,000 ballots, or 1.7 percent of those cast across the state, either did not record a preference for president or could not be counted because the voter ed more than one candidate. Ohio recorded the second-highest number of missing votes in the country, only behind the most populous state, California. The number of unrecorded votes actually increased in Ohio whereas in states that replaced their punch cards saw dramatic decreases in votes tossed away by the machines. For example, in Florida, only 30,509 of the 7.6 million ballots failed to record a vote for president, down from 178,145 that went unrecorded four years ago.

Yet a federal judge has just ruled in a separate proceeding that using punch card ballot machines in some places, and using much more effective voting machines in others, is just fine under the Constitution. According to the judge, essentially it's the fault of the voter's own incompetence if his or her punch card ballot cannot be read. Therefore, Ohio can go right ahead and continue to use these irrefutably bad machines in 2006 and 2008, as long as they provide one accessible machine per precinct. Indeed, some Ohio legislators are now indicating that they may fight the Secretary of State's plans to get rid of the state's punch cards.

Most observers believe that the recount and challenge efforts in Ohio will not be effective. Some, such as representatives of the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party, express hope that they will at least serve as an impetus to reform. But with most of the country moving on believing that the 2004 election was a success, and those who are concerned with the election obsessed with computer hacking, is anybody listening?

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Tova Wang is senior program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.

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