Winner clear, but election still had glitches

While voting in 2004 did not come close to the chaos of Florida in 2000, numerous problems made it difficult for thousands to cast their ballots.

BY FRANK DAVIES   Miami Herald   08 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 daylong 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.

? Registration problems 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. A computer recorded 3,893 extra votes for President Bush in Franklin County, Ohio, before the mistake was discovered.

? Election offices were often late to get out absentee ballots, with thousands sent out by Broward County 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.

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

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