Nearly 2 million Cook County residents went to the polls this week and gripping a small stylus, punched pinholes in a computer card to vote for president and other offices.
But somehow, 120,503 of them either failed to register a choice for president or rendered their choice unusable by piercing holes next to names of two or more candidates.
County officials say the same thing happens every election year, yet hardly anyone complains about the punch card apparatus. Now, however, problems with a similar system in Florida have thrown the presidential election into chaos and triggered a wave of national hand-wringing about the shortcomings of the punch card system.
Election experts say the spotlight has dramatized what they have long known are imperfections in not just punch cards but in all variations of the way Americans vote. In fact, they say, even with attempts to modernize voting by experimenting with high-tech optical readers, ATM-like touch-screen computers and online balloting, the practice of casting and counting ballots will remain imperfect.
“It is not an exact science,” said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc., a Washington-based consultant on the administration of elections. “Even if you go with touch-screen [technology], you are putting your faith in the electronic recording of your vote. Computers can go wrong too.”
Although punch cards may seem about as high-tech as a rotary telephone, they are used in about 90 percent of all polling places in Illinois. Election officials favor the system because it is cheap to operate and, compared with old-fashioned paper ballots or voting machines, considered more reliable.
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No high-tech voting systems are in use in Illinois. State election law doesn’t forbid their use, but it doesn’t explicitly authorize it, either. And election officials say they won’t attempt to experiment with anything new unless they get a specific go-ahead from the General Assembly.
That could come within weeks. The House and Senate have already passed versions of legislation that would allow the use of touch-screen voting machines. An attempt to reconcile the differences may come up in the fall veto session, which opened Thursday.
In Florida, the controversy has surrounded the design of the punch card ballot used in Palm Beach County. Concerns were raised when 3,407 votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan appeared in precincts that tend to support liberal Democrats.
Voters there have complained that the design of what is known as a “butterfly ballot,” which put opposing candidates on either side of a row of punch holes, may have caused them to mark the wrong candidate.
Hoping to preempt criticism of the punch card system used here, Cook County Clerk David Orr said Thursday that ballots used locally are designed to protect against the kind of problems that Democrats claim have undermined the integrity of the Palm Beach vote.
“For president, a voter looks only to the left hand page and sees all candidates in vertical order,” Orr said.
At the same time, he acknowledged complaints over the way the ballot listed dozens of judges around a densely packed strip of “yes” and “no” choices. But Orr said there was no evidence that confusion over the design had affected the outcomes.
Each generation of voting system creates new advantages–but also new problems.
The old paper ballots, in which voters placed an “X” in a box next to a candidate, were simple for voters to read but had to be hand-counted–a slow process susceptible to errors or outright fraud. Also, voters continually had to be reminded that only an “X”–not a check or a slash–would be recognized.
Then came mechanical lever voting machines, which left no paper trail, making recounts difficult. Suburban Cook County junked the 600-pound behemoths in 1976 and switched to the punch card system; Chicago followed suit in 1982.
As of 1998, more than a third of the nation’s voters used punch card systems, including large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and Chicago, according to Brace’s firm.
But punch cards are susceptible not only to design problems but to something known in the parlance of election experts as the “hanging chad,” the lingering dot of paper that sometimes clings to the ballot after a punch. When the ballot is fed into a computer, that paper scrap can scramble the results.
About one-fourth of polling places across the nation are now equipped with optical scanning systems that combine elements of the paper ballot with the same computer wizardry used to grade standardized school tests administered to high school students. Essentially, voters mark their choices on paper with an ordinary pen and the ballot is fed into an optical scanner that reads and records the choices.
One pitfall of using such a system is that, depending on the jurisdiction, it can require millions of ballots to be printed well in advance of Election Day, making last minute changes all but impossible.
Just under 10 percent of voters nationwide use computerized voting booths. Though fast and reliable, touch-screen voting technology has been slow to spread because it is expensive–machines cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. That means that without spending a lot more money, fewer voting booths would be available at individual precincts and lines would be longer.
Last year, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners toyed with buying touch screens and solicited bids for a citywide system. The bids came in around $55 million, compared with $13 million the city paid for its punch card system.
Despite frequent calls for an online revolution in voting, computer security experts warn it would face many of the same problems that beset online commerce. Ballots can be undermined by computer viruses or hijacked by hackers.
“We are not at the point where we are ready to jump in and start voting online,” said Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a non-profit group that examines privacy issues on the Internet.
The first test of secret ballot Internet voting came in the Arizona Democratic primary last spring. It attracted nearly 40,000 online voters–more than doubling the party’s turnout for a conventional primary in 1996. But it was plagued by software glitches, garbled names and transmission problems.
The online vote also sparked a lawsuit by Virginia-based Voting Integrity Project, which alleged that it gave wealthy whites an unfair edge over minorities, who might have less access to computers.
Schwartz predicted that the Florida problems will lead to pressure on election officials to adopt increasingly sophisticated voting methods. And while he thinks online voting may work fine for non-critical and small-scale balloting such as corporate shareholder elections, he is wary about its widescale application in politics.
“Because of the current situation, you will see pressure to move in that direction,” said Schwartz. “But caution must be advised.”
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