Maybe election day won't be a fiasco after all

For weeks, headlines have blared about anticipated problems on Election Day as new technology is deployed around the country. The Nov. 7 vote "could get ugly," warned one paper. Public officials are "wary" of electronic voting machines, said another, noting calls by some leaders to revert to paper ballots.

Indeed, the unprecedented rollout of new machines, as provided by law following the Florida election fiasco of 2000, led to widely reported problems during this year's primaries – including some where close elections are anticipated, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Missouri, in a year where partisan control of Congress hangs in the balance.

Election experts have no trouble painting doomsday scenarios in which control of the House boils down to one or two close races that are thrown into recounts and legal wrangling that drag on for weeks, even into January – which could leave it up to the current Republican majority to decide whom to seat and whom not to seat.

"But that would have to be a perfect storm," says Edward Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University.

In fact, experts report the system is improving overall, even as intense scrutiny of problems threatens to undermine voter confidence in the accuracy of elections. An analysis published earlier this year by Charles Stewart, head of the political science department at MIT, found that a reduction in the "residual vote rate" – blank votes and over-votes in which too many votes are cast – led to the counting of an additional 1 million ballots in 2004, compared with 2000.

Three of the four states with big declines – Florida, Georgia, and Illinois – had made significant upgrades in their voting machines in the intervening years, and it is likely that those upgrades were a major factor, Mr. Stewart says. Florida alone saw a decline in blank votes and over-votes from 2.9 percent to 0.4 percent.

"The positive message I'm trying to bring is that if we focus on a particular problem, we can make progress," says Stewart. The problem with voting machines "hasn't been perfectly handled, but bottom line, more people were enfranchised as a consequence of what we did over the last four years."

New machines, which featured improved interface with voters and no more hanging chads, were not the only reason for improvement, Stewart notes. States with lowered residual vote rates had also done a better job of training poll workers. And voters knew to be more careful as they voted, after the problems in 2000.

Looking ahead to Nov. 7, in which 30 percent of the nation's voting jurisdictions will be using new equipment, election experts agree that the biggest test is yet to come, and a variety of factors could snowball into major problems: Election officials are chronically short of poll workers, and many who do come are retirees uncomfortable with new technology. The high demand for electronic voting machines, with just a few vendors producing them, has led to delays in delivery and a shortage of technical support staff.

Page: 1 | 2