The vote you cast may not be tallied
1 out of 100 shown uncounted in 2004

Vicki Haddock, San Francisco Chronicle  Sunday, February 27, 2005
 
You read the newspapers, watch the candidates' debates, mull the issues with friends, and then you do your democratic duty:

You vote.

Or you think you vote.

Perhaps your ballot gets jammed in an overstuffed machine, or is accidentally shipped to a warehouse, or gets miscounted due to human or computer error. Maybe it is spit out because of a dangling chad or a stray dot of ink, or because your signature is loopier than when you registered. Ballots even get tossed into the trash it has happened.

Chances are you'll never even know you were disenfranchised.

This reality is part of the rationale behind legislation proposed by Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Hillary Clinton of New York and John Kerry of Massachusetts to require dozens of reforms including required random recounts and a paper trail on electronic voting. The legislation has a wonderfully idealistic name: the Count Every Vote Act.

Such a goal is rather akin to a lifetime batting average of 1.000 worth striving for, but impossible to attain.

Although it is a deeply held American principle that every vote counts, research has found that 1 out of every 100 ballots cast in the 2004 election for president weren't counted.

In most elections, the uncounted votes are insignificant: the margin of error is smaller than the margin of victory.

But some recent elections have been infinitesimally close. Statistics has a name for such outcomes: ties. Nobody will ever know who really won because a recount is no more scientific than a coin flip.

Yet inevitably, someone must win. The loser is left to complain about voting irregularities, suggest the election was stolen, perhaps even take it to court.

This month, the GOP in Washington state is trying to persuade a judge to undo the inauguration of a Democratic governor who won on a second recount by a margin of just 129 votes. And many Democrats nationwide still begrudge George W. Bush who in 2000 won Florida's electoral votes and thus the presidency by a margin of 0.0009 percent with bumper stickers proclaiming "Hail to the Thief."

We in San Francisco can be thankful we've been spared a too-close-to-call election, given the troubled history of the city registrar's office. Among past snafus: Ballots were belatedly discovered stuck in a machine, misfiled in a warehouse, and soaked and spread in a microwave to dry not to mention the seriocomic tale of ballot box lids washing up all over San Francisco Bay. (Voters were assured that the boxes contained no actual ballots.)

Voters were less fortunate in the November election in San Diego, where 5, 547 residents had their votes for mayor discarded because, although they wrote in the name of candidate Donna Frye, they failed to fill in the bubble next to her name. Had all of those votes been counted, she would have won by a 3,400- vote margin. Instead, Mayor Dick Murphy has settled in for another term, and Frye's supporters went to court contending unsuccessfully that a technicality was thwarting the will of the people.

For years, researchers with the Cal Tech/MIT Voting Technology Project have studied what happens to votes that seemingly disappear. They've found vast differences among different techniques of voting. They have concluded, for example, that punch cards produced uncounted presidential votes nearly twice as often as alternatives such as optically scanned paper ballots and ATM- like electronic machines. They've also noted that some of those uncounted votes can be attributed to voters who deliberately opted not to vote for any candidate for president.

In an analysis released earlier this month, these researchers concluded that the presidential election of 2004, in which 1 in 91 votes didn't count, was run "much better" than the 2000 election, in which 1 in 53 ballots didn't count.

"In a close election, no level of accuracy is quite enough, is it, short of perfection?" asks Kirk Wolter, a University of Chicago statistics professor who supervised the team hired by the media to review Florida ballots after the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000. "There are huge potential error rates, and the reason we've lived with it so long is because very few people knew about it, and elections weren't that close. ... Now we know better."

Even though the 2004 presidential contest was not as close as 2000, skeptics were able to cite instances of voting irregularities and ask the ominous "What if?" More than 70 percent of voters in Ohio used the same punch- card system that wreaked such havoc in Florida in 2000.

Democrats complained about problems such as ridiculously long waits to vote in minority precincts up to 10 hours while Republicans could cite irregularities of their own, including the Toledo man charged with a felony for allegedly submitting 100 phony registrations for would-be voters such as "Mary Poppins" and "Dick Tracy" in exchange for cocaine.

But for a marathon photo finish: Republican Dino Rossi won the Washington governor's race on the first count and a machine recount the latter by just 42 votes, or 0.00001 percent of the total. Then Seattle Democrats found 732 absentee ballots omitted because election workers had made errors, such as failing to verify voters' signatures mistakes that came to light after King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips discovered his own vote hadn't counted. A second recount, this one by hand, concluded with Democrat Christine Gregoire eking out victory.

Republican Rossi watched his rival's swearing-in ceremony on television at his Rossi Revote Headquarters, saying, "Most people believe that Washington does not have a legitimately elected governor."

The federal government appropriated money via its Help America Vote Act to pay for election reforms, including phasing out punch cards. The National Commission on Election Reform has recommended that states reduce their error rates below 2 percent no matter what mechanism they use.

But a headlong rush toward electronic machines hit the skids after computer experts raised faith-shaking concerns that systems without paper trails could be corrupted by a dishonest election official or even an outside hacker.

Elections expert Henry Brady, professor of political science and public policy at UC Berkeley, advocates "mall testing" new systems among regular folks. Although he says vote counts are improving, progress is "excruciatingly slow, and we're still not where we should be."

But nothing can guarantee a fool-proof national election one that requires billions and billions of transactions.

"I think we have thousands of state and county election workers who are doing a great job, but at the end of the day, the system they have to work with defeats them," said self-described elections geek Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan clearinghouse electionline.org. "A close-up view of any election reveals it for what it is: part idealism, part realism and part duct tape and chewing gum.