Voting in America: The flaws persist

For all the talk after 2000 of making state and local voting systems more reliable, persistent shortcomings were again on display in 2004.

The Roanoke Times    19 December 2004

 The Florida vote-count debacle of 2000 did not recur in 2004.

For that, however, credit the fact that this year's presidential election was not as agonizingly close as in 2000. Do not credit great strides toward a fairer, more accurate and more confidence-inspiring system of voting and vote-counting. The latter does not yet exist. The Florida margin in 2000 was extraordinarily tight: George W. Bush won the state that year by 537 votes (officially, anyway) out of millions cast, and the election hinged on Florida's electoral votes.

But such razor-thin margins in important elections are not exceedingly rare. As of this writing, for example, the Nov. 2 gubernatorial election in Washington state was still up in the air, with only 42 votes separating the candidates as the process moved from a machine recount to a hand recount.

One flaw in the system nationally is the failure to require, on a consistent basis, a paper trail for electronic voting.

In electronic-voting counties in Washington's gubernatorial election, the "hand" recount as required by state law consists simply of pulling computer tapes with cumulative totals and writing the figures down on a paper worksheet. There's no way to genuinely double-check the accuracy of the computer's cumulative totals.

Lack of paper audit backups bespeaks a faith in the accuracy of electronic equipment that many computer experts say is unwarranted. Anecdotal evidence supports them. In one Ohio precinct in this year's presidential election, for example, a computer recorded nearly 4,000 extra votes for Bush.

That malfunction was detected because only 638 voters cast ballots in the precinct. But the source of the problem remains unknown, and it raises the possibility of other errors elsewhere that were not so detectable.

To focus exclusively on equipment flaws, however, would be to ignore more mundane but no less extensive shortcomings in the system.

In a Dec. 7 report, Common Cause reported thousands of instances of voters unable to get basic information from their local election boards, of long lines forcing voters who could not afford hours-long waits to leave before they could cast their ballots, of provisional ballots not counted that should have been, of registration list errors.

No system is perfect. But America's voting systems could be, and should be, much better than they are.