Burke vote shows higher rate without presidential choice

Associated Press   15 January 2005

RALEIGH, N.C. - Poorly designed ballots and insufficient education - not a problem with ballot machines - led a number of Burke County voters to fail to cast votes for president, state elections officials said.

"A whole bunch of folks didn't vote for president," Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, D-Orange, said Friday during a meeting of a special committee she leads studying how to reform the state's voting systems.

The Unilect brand electronic voting machines in Burke County were the same type as those used in Carteret County, where an error in programming led one machine to dump more than 4,400 votes from its memory.

More than 10 percent of Burke's voters did not cast a ballot for president, a rate three to four times higher than the statewide average, according to state elections officials who visited the county last month.

The ballot design contributed to the problem, election officials said. The screen on the machines showed the presidential candidates and the straight party ticket vote on the same screen.

A straight-party vote s all candidates from the ed party but in North Carolina applies to all races except president.

Burke voters easily could have believe the straight party vote included the presidency, said Don Wright, general counsel for the State Board of Elections.

In contrast, people who showed up to vote in Burke but weren't on voter rolls received individual guidance from a precinct worker, including a reminder about the presidential race.

More than 8 percent of absentee voters who mailed in ballots in Burke also did not vote for president, Wright said.

A higher-than-average percentage of Burke voters also didn't vote for senator or governor and other statewide races.

Burke's provisional ballot voters, who used paper ballots, had a much lower rate of skipping those races than voters who used the machines.

The committee hopes to make some recommendations to reform voting machine use to the General Assembly as it reconvenes Jan. 26.