Election 2004 Is History. Questions Keep Coming: Ann Woolner

Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) Maybe you thought the U.S. presidential election was over a month ago. In a sense, it wasn't.

Yes, the winner was picked. Still, even as President George W. Bush is assembling his second-term cabinet, an ad hoc array of statisticians, candidates, public interest groups and just plain folks are challenging vote totals from Florida to Washington state.

They have been poring over statistical anomalies and voter complaints and worrying about uncounted provisional ballots. They have been filing lawsuits and seeking recounts and pushing election officials for data. They are amassing material and discussing strategies by e-mail and on conference calls.

What they have been turning up should alarm even those who are neither conspiracy theorists nor sore losers.

``Had it not been the margin of victory that it was for President Bush, we would have been looking at a situation that would have made Florida look like traffic court,'' says Tova Wang, who studies elections for the Century Foundation in New York, a public research organization.

She was referring, of course, to Florida's 2000 catastrophe, which threw the presidential contest into mayhem until the U.S. Supreme Court halted vote recounts a month later. It also led to reforms and to more scrutiny this year than ever before.

Bits and Pieces

``There are so many bits and pieces that worked questionably,'' says Stuart Comstock-Gay, executive director of the Voting Rights Institute in Boston, a non-partisan advocacy group. ``If the numbers hadn't been big enough in, say, Florida and Ohio, we would be in a morass right now.''

We are not in a morass because it's extremely unlikely voting problems changed the outcome of the presidential race. We still are in something of a mess.

On Election Day 2004, a computer in North Carolina ate 4,400 votes. A technical glitch in Indiana gave hundreds of Democratic votes to a Libertarian candidate.

Another error created thousands of non-existent Bush voters in Ohio, while a lawsuit alleges that official rolls in Ohio's most populous county omitted 170,000 registered voters. In Florida, absentee ballots arrived at would-be voters' homes too late.

Long Lines

All over the country, so many precincts in heavy turnout areas were assigned so few voting machines that lines stretched hours longer than some could spare.

Watchdog groups have gathered reports of more than 26,000 problems. In some cases, they say, thousands of votes were lost.

Suspicions that Bush supporters stole the election may have abated as some of the sinister-seeming statistical anomalies have been explained. Still, conspiracy theories ricochet around the Internet.

It doesn't inspire confidence when the official in charge of running elections in a key state also heads a presidential campaign. So it was in Ohio, where the election was decided and where Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell doubles as top election administrator and Bush-Cheney co-chairman.

Blackwell's dual role tainted every election decision he made that favored Republicans, and there were many.

``It's a huge problem that you have partisan officials in charge of administering official elections,'' says Wang.

Either by choice or by state law, secretaries of state should stay out of candidates' campaigns or else hand over election administration to nonpolitical employees.

What Matters

Even for those, like Wang, who say there is little chance that Election Day problems cost Senator John Kerry the White House, getting to the bottom of the errors matters. A lot.

The issue is urgent in Washington state, where a mere 42 votes out of 2.8 million put the Republican nominee for governor ahead of the Democrat. The state has yet to do a hand recount, which experience shows could flip an election this close.

Meanwhile, in coastal Carteret County, North Carolina, voters will be going to the polls again to settle the state agriculture commissioner race. The 2,300-vote margin for the Republican candidate might have been different if not for the 4,400 lost votes there.

``While the degree of problems weren't the same as in the year 2000, the problems were still extremely serious,'' says Elliot Mincberg of the People for the American Way Foundation, one of the groups filing post-election lawsuits.

Breathing Room

That the outcome of the national election doesn't hang in the balance offers breathing room while problems are identified, quantified and, one would hope, remedied.

The General Accountability Office and the U.S. Election Assistance Committee are investigating, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is testing machines and writing standards for them.

Without more data, ``we don't know what we don't know,'' says DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the election commission, created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Now, for the first time, there is a group officially charged with looking into election problems nationally and suggesting to states ways to fix them.

``Never in history have we asked, as a country, how often does a voting machine malfunction,'' Soaries said. ``We had no such capacity.''

Examining Malfunctions

His commission, with its contract with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, can determine whether the computer that ate ballots in North Carolina is the same make of the one that malfunctioned in Detroit, for example.

To prevent computer manipulation and to verify votes in recounts, he said, the commission expects to set standards for security and accountability for electronic voting.

As for the long lines, the group will consider ways states can better predict demand for machines and assign them to precincts accordingly.

Soaries says the Election Assistance Commission expects to draft recommendations next spring with hearings to follow.

What about all those computer geeks and watchdog groups out there that are doing their own analyses and lodging complaints?

``What we intend to do is to take every question seriously without taking every theory seriously,'' says Soaries.

If the commission's answers fail to satisfy, you can bet there will be citizens and watchdog groups that will tell us about that, too. As it should be.