Report: Invalid Florida ballots at all time low in 2004 election

By BRENDAN FARRINGTON
Associated Press Writer   01 February 2005 
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - The banishment of chads helped lead to the lowest level of invalid ballots ever measured in a presidential or gubernatorial election in Florida, said a report released Tuesday.

Floridians cast about 1.5 million more votes in the 2004 presidential election than they did in the disputed 2000 contest, yet the combined number of overvotes and undervotes fell by about 83 percent from 179,855 to 31,453, according to the report prepared by the Department of State.

George W. Bush carried the state by nearly 381,000 votes.

Overvotes are ballots on which more than one candidate is ed; undervotes are ballots on which no candidate is ed. In 2000, 2.9 percent of all ballots cast were invalid because of overvotes and undervotes, a figure that ped to 0.78 percent in the 2002 gubernatorial election and 0.41 percent last November.

"It's exactly what we would expect. After the 2000 election, the Florida Legislature acted. We got rid of punchards, lever machines and the one county that counted ballots on paper" by hand, said Orange County elections supervisor Bill Cowles, who serves as the president of the county supervisors association.

He said state officials and the 67 supervisors wanted to prove to the world that they not only identified voter problems, but had also solved them. He noted the significant in invalid ballots in 2002 and that the overall number of invalid ballots fell again last fall, which he attributed to further voter education.

Punchcard ballots were outlawed after Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 in an election in which thousands of ballots were examined during five weeks of recounts. On many, the tiny rectangles of cardboard that were supposed to be punched out by voters were merely dimpled or left hanging, making it harder for machines to read them.

Since then, Floridians either vote on touchscreen machines or with optical-scan ballots, which require voters to mark a ballot which is later read by a machine. It is impossible to cast overvotes on a touchscreen machine, thus Florida's 4,116 overvotes were all cast on optical scan machines.

A comparison of undervotes showed an insignificant difference between optical-scan ballots and touchscreen ballots. Of optical-scan ballots cast, 0.40 percent were left blank in the presidential race, compared to 0.42 percent of touchscreen ballots.

"We never will eliminate undervotes totally because that's the prerogative of the voter," said Jenny Nash, a Department of State spokeswoman.