Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Election Reform: Lessons From 2004, page 2

What Went Wrong
Despite these successes, the surge of new voters in 2004 in many communities overwhelmed the capacity of the election system and revealed problems that needlessly impair or discourage voting by many citizens. These problems sustain doubts about the accuracy and fairness of results, according to nonpartisan experts and organizations.

As the Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, editorialized, “Though the 2004 presidential election was, operationally, a rousing success when compared to the debased standards of 2000, American democracy is hardly out of the woods. If anything, voter cynicism is rising . . .”

While accusations of voter intimidation, tampering with electronic voting, and biased election officials were most likely to get media attention, the greater problems are more mundane. The United States continues to operate an election system administered by too many state and local officials who tolerate serious flaws, inconsistent rules, unaccountability and high error rates that would be intolerable in any other important enterprise, such as banking or even Las Vegas casinos.

Long lines at polling places continued to take a heavy toll on election day, forcing many voters to choose between hours-long waits or not voting. The many local and state variations in eligibility and voting procedures also treat voters differently—depending on where they live and vote—thus undermining their right to equal protection for all under the Constitution. With over 200,000 polling places nationwide, operated largely by temporary paid staffs or volunteers, the complexity and scale of these problems makes solving them no small task. But they must be addressed because, as Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation notes, “Citizens having their voice heard through the casting of their votes is a symbol of the strength of our democracy. If large segments of the electorate doubt that their vote has been counted—or feel that obstacles to participation in an election have been put in their path—democracy itself is undermined and put at risk.”

Here are several key problems highlighted by the 2004 election.

Flawed Electronic Voting Technologies
Voting accuracy in 2004 improved significantly after many states replaced punch cards and lever machines with more accurate touch-screen machines, which record votes electronically, and optical-scan ballots, which are similar to machine-graded standardized tests. About one-third of all votes were cast electronically in 2004, up from one-eighth in 2000.

For example, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel analysis found that stringent new state voting system requirements that banned punch-card and lever-machine systems resulted in sharply lower numbers of spoiled ballots in the presidential election. Where spoilage rates were as high as 12 percent in 2000 in one Florida county, the 2004 rates had fallen to below one-half percent overall (and even lower, 0.3 percent, in counties with paper optical-scan ballots).

However, punch-card ballots and lever machines remained in widespread use in 2004, although this may have been the last major election using these widely criticized systems. For example, 69 of Ohio’s 88 counties, or 73 percent of the state’s registered voters, still used punch cards, a technology developed for the 1890 U.S. Census and now used in virtually no other important public or private enterprise. Lever machines (called “big iron” by some) were first used in 1892 and were still employed in 2004 in jurisdictions where 21 million voters live. By January 1, 2006, states receiving HAVA funds must replace all punch-card and lever-machine systems.

Many critics of their replacements, touch-screen systems (the most common form of “direct-recording electronic” systems), object mostly to their lack of a printed record of votes cast, preventing any way to verify accuracy. Votes are recorded electronically only, leading to suspicions that results can be manipulated without detection. “Without a paper trail, there’s simply nothing to check against in order to verify accuracy,” wrote a columnist in Computer World. Another critic called it a “faith-based” voting system.

Inconsistent Rules for Provisional Ballots
Called “fail-safe” voting by supporters, the requirement by HAVA that all states make provisional ballots available to voters in 2004 was a much-praised feature of the new law. Unfortunately, Congress failed to require uniform standards for their implementation, and the result was widely disparate rules applied by state and local election officials. One sign of these disparities was in the widely varying number of such ballots cast, ranging from a high of over 200,000 in Arizona to only 23,246 in Texas and 94 in Delaware.

For example, 31 states disqualified provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, even for statewide and federal offices. Ten states would not count provisional ballots without identification, while 15 states allowed voters to have their ballots counted if they could present verification of their registration “shortly after” election day.

The percentage of provisional ballots accepted and counted varied greatly, as well. It ranged from a high of 77.33 percent counted in Ohio and 76.08 percent in Colorado, to 7.69 percent in Oklahoma and 6.38 percent in Delaware.

Many observers criticized this uneven application of what was supposed to be a “fail-safe” way to correct registration errors by either election officials or the voter. The varying results of 2004 provisional ballot procedures, according to a Business Week editorial, “raise a fairness question: Why should a vote count under one state’s rules but not under another’s?”

Absentee and Early Voting Problems
Because of the growing popularity of absentee and in-person early voting in 2004, the resulting number and variety of problems revealed persistent shortcomings in how we administer elections. Local election officials continue to have problems getting absentee ballots on time to overseas voters, to absent voters in other states, or even to voters in their communities.

For example, media articles days before the general election reported that more than 58,000 absentee ballots mailed by Broward County, Florida, officials failed to reach intended recipients. Phone lines and staff were overwhelmed by the volume of complaints from voters seeking their ballots. Despite last-minute efforts, many could not receive and return ballots before election day, and potentially thousands were thus prevented from voting. Where in-person early voting was offered, there were also problems: in many areas, the public turned out in such large numbers that they often overwhelmed the too-few sites and staff—creating long lines and long waits.

Enough data are not available yet to draw conclusions about the success of federal programs to improve access by military and civilian citizens living or working overseas, but individual reports of absentee ballot problems showed that some of these problems persist because of their reliance on far-flung postal systems. The Defense Department scrapped a plan to offer Internet voting to overseas military personnel after pre-election experiments showed they could not guarantee that voting records would be kept secure.

Next page: Florida’s secretary of state ordered officials to throw out registration forms on which applicants failed to check a box saying they are citizens, even though elsewhere on the forms, they signed a statement affirming their citizenship.

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