Election 2000: Is This Any Way To Vote?

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For now, however, voting around the country is a patchwork of flawed and often antiquated methods. For more than a century, voting techniques have paralleled the stages of the Industrial Revolution. Big metal voting machines, products of the age of iron and steel, were first used in New York State in 1892. Then as now, voters simply pulled down a lever beside each candidate's name. That permits faster and more legible counts than paper ballots. (A slow count had been one of the issues in the disputed Tilden-Hayes election of 1876.) By the 1960s, half of all voters used them.

But the machines were the steam engines of democracy, weighty and expensive. It was at the peak of their popularity, in 1964, that nimble cardboard punch cards arrived, trailing instant prestige as descendants from the same tabulating process used by the computers of that day. They were also cheaper than the old machines, which meant localities could buy more of them to reduce long lines at polling places. By now the punch cards are the most common election device, used by 34% of voters, and the old machines have gone out of production.

But punch cards introduce their own problems. Holes that are incompletely punctured by the voter can baffle the counting machines. Those problems led Wisconsin to ban the cards in the 1990s, just as New Hampshire had done in 1986. In 1988, a report by the National Bureau of Standards, a federal agency, recommended that punch cards be abandoned everywhere. William Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, recalls a test run in which just five cards were put through a counting machine three times--and produced three different counts. "It was not the most comforting feeling when you had to do a recount with punch cards," says Gardner. "We often had to decide how much light going through a tear would be enough to rule that it was a vote for the candidate. Even some winning candidates just felt bad about the process."

About a fourth of Americans vote the same way they take standardized tests or mark lottery tickets--by filling in circles or arrow lines on cards that are read on the spot by optical scanners. "You can have a multitude of people marking ballots at the same time, so you get rid of the waiting lines," says Ed Packard, election administrator in Alabama, where all but three of the state's 67 counties use the method. "And you can program the machines to kick overmarked ballots back to the voter to redo." The scanners also claim an optimal accuracy rate of 99%, but the scanning machines are costly.