CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By RICHARD LACAYO

It was 10 o’clock on election night, 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 the 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 virtual tie between Bush and Gore in Florida 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. Campaigns may be marvels of scientific polling and precision focus groups. Then comes Election Day and a piece of damp cardboard.

In presidential elections, about 2% of all ballots 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 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.

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. They were 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. A 1988 report by the National Bureau of Standards urged that punch cards be abandoned everywhere. William Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state, recalls a test run in which 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," he says. "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.

Now, at the cyberstage of the Industrial Revolution, the cutting edge of voting is by computer. Around 9% of voters currently use computer touch screens similar to those of atm machines. But the touch-screen systems are still subject to programming crashes, which could be disastrous in the event of a recount. And the Internet? For now, the prospect of Web voting is promising, but some of what it promises is trouble. It opens the way to easy voting at computer terminals anywhere—not just at polling places but at every office, school and library. Results could be tabulated instantly. But Internet voting also opens the possibility of election results being stolen by hackers. And if voting were permitted from home computers, it could lead to the worst kind of "digital divide," in which only Americans without computers—meaning the poor and the elderly—have to go out to vote, while others do it from the comfort of home

—TIME, November 27, 2000

Questions
1. What did the controversy over Florida ballots reveal about our system of voting?

2. What methods of voting does the article describe? Of these, which would you advocate? Why?

Punch Card
Percent Who Voted This Way: 34%
How It Works: Voters insert blank cards into clipboard-size devices, then punch the hole opposite their choice. Ballots are read by a computer tabulator.
Pros/Cons: Although this method is relatively economical, holes are often incompletely punched and the machine has trouble reading such ballots.

Optical Scan
Percent Who Voted This Way: 27%
How It Works: Voters fill in rectangles, circles, ovals or incomplete arrows next to their candidate. A computer selects the darkest mark as the choice.
Pros/Cons: Easy for voter to use, and double-marked ballots are immediately rejected. But the equipment is expensive and can have problems reading sloppily marked forms.

Lever Machine
Percent Who Voted
This Way: 19%
How It Works: Each candidate is assigned a lever, which voters push down to indicate their choices.
Pros/Cons: Once the most popular form of voting, the machines are simple to use but heavy, old and no longer manufactured. There is no paper trail if recounts are necessary.

Electronic
Percent Who Voted This Way: 9%
How It Works: Voters directly enter choices into the machine using a touch screen or push buttons. Votes are stored via a memory cartridge.
Pros/Cons: Though as easy as using an atm, this new technology is still fairly expensive. Again, there is no physical ballot in the event of a recount.

Paper Ballots
Percent Who Voted This Way: 2%
How It Works: Voters record their choices in private by marking the boxes next to the candidate and then drop ballots in a sealed box.
Pros/Cons: An inexpensive and straightforward method that dates back to 1889. But counting and recounting can be very slow.

TIME CLASSROOM