Groups detail voting problems in 2004 election

By FRANK DAVIES    Miami Herald   07 December 2004

WASHINGTON - The 2004 presidential election had a clear, uncontested result, but voters still experienced serious problems, from machine errors to long lines and registration flaws, Common Cause and several other groups reported Tuesday.

During a day-long forum on Capitol Hill, state officials, computer experts and voting rights advocates detailed a series of flaws that persisted this year, despite reforms and upgrades since the 2000 election:

Long lines in Ohio, New Mexico and during Florida's early voting made it difficult for some voters to cast their ballots. Because of a lack of machines and staffing problems, some Ohio voters waited seven hours in the rain to vote.

Registration problems, including counties struggling to rolls of new voters, prevented thousands of people from voting easily. On Election Day, many voters could not get through by phone to local election offices and had difficulty casting provisional ballots.

While much of the new technology performed well, serious flaws occurred. A computer malfunction wiped out 4,400 votes in Carteret County, N.C., and 3,893 extra votes were recorded for President Bush in Franklin County, Ohio.

Election offices were often late to get out absentee ballots. Thousands sent out by Broward County, Fla., were lost in the mail.

"The election did not go smoothly, despite the fact that a president was chosen without court intervention, and without the chaos that many observers feared," the Common Cause report concluded.

The forum, also hosted by the Century Foundation and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, highlighted some of the pluses and minuses of different voting equipment.

David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford, cited stories of voters using electronic systems who said their votes were switched, or that some races were left off their ballots.

"I've seen many theories about stolen elections, and while I've seen no evidence of that, it's very difficult to get the evidence," said Dill, the founder of VerifiedVoting.org.

Equipment breakdowns in several urban areas, including New Orleans and Philadelphia, also made it difficult for voters to cast their ballots, he said.

While no electronic voting fraud has been discovered yet, a "malicious code" to do that would be easy to write and hard to detect, warned David Jefferson, who heads California's oversight committee on the security and reliability of voting systems.

"It is a potential weapon of mass electoral destruction," Jefferson said.

Beyond technology, there was some good news in the area of voter education, reported Ted Selker, an MIT professor and computer expert. He noted that Los Angeles County "reduced its error rate significantly" in votes cast this year through a TV public-service campaign.