Is This Any Way To Vote?

It was 10 O'clock on election night two weeks ago, and poll watchers in the small Georgia town of Dallas had a problem. The weather was humid and rainy. Now their vote-counting machine was rejecting thousands of punch-card ballots because the cardboard had warped in the damp night air. What to do? Break out the blow-dryers! "As weird as it sounds, it's standard procedure," says Fran Watson, election superintendent for Paulding County, where Dallas is located. "We blow a hair dryer over them, and then they'll go through."

Three cheers for democracy in action. But should the future of free elections rest on the continuing popularity of big hair? The one heartwarming lesson from the Bush-Gore debacle is supposed to be that every vote counts. The less comforting lesson is that a lot of votes don't get counted. Thanks to the spectacularly imperfect voting methods in use around the U.S.--scribbled paper, antique voting machines and those finicky punch cards--hundreds of thousands of ballots are discarded each year. American political campaigns may be marvels of scientific polling and precision focus groups. Then comes Election Day and a piece of damp cardboard.

You can say this for the ongoing struggle over Florida--it has forced people to notice that U.S. voting methods are not exactly state of the art. About 2% of all ballots in presidential elections, for example, are marked for more than one candidate or for none, mostly as a consequence of voter confusion. This year that would have been more than 2 million votes. The chaos, as we've learned in the past two weeks, extends to the counting process as well. In New Mexico, a 500-vote discrepancy was traced to a vote counter's sloppy handwriting: the number 620 was misread as 120.

Can't we do any better? It might be easier to reform the system if there were a system, but the Constitution left election procedures to the states. They in turn have mostly passed the responsibility down to the counties and cities, some 3,000 of them, which choose their preferred methods and pay for them. It's the paying part that is often the stumbling block. "If your choice is between new voting machines and a road grader," says Arkansas secretary of state Sharon Priest, "it's no contest."

The adoption of a uniform national voting technology might be a good idea, but it's something almost no one expects to see. For one thing, it would require poor districts and rich ones to agree on what is affordable. "The states are rightly in charge," says Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonpartisan research group. But while Gans and other experts don't support a uniform nationwide voting method, they do favor measures such as design standards for all ballots. Ballots at every polling place could have a standard type size and style and be marked in the same spots for each office.

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