In the year since Florida voters forced a spotlight on the helter-skelter rules that govern elections, state and federal officials continue to perpetuate a system of haphazard democracy where the right to vote does not guarantee the right to have that vote counted.
All major reform efforts had stalled even before Congress and the White House turned their attention to terrorism and the national economy in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
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“Despite Florida, unfortunately, the election system overall is not getting fixed,” said Kimball Brace, director of Election Data Services, a non-profit consultant company based in Washington.
“Congress is so split on reform measures that no action is considered action. The longer we wait the harder it’s going to be to solve the problem,” said Brace, who analyzes voting patterns and works with state and federal governments.
And the problem, it is now clear, extends beyond the borders and peculiarities of Florida as revealed in the 2000 election and recount.
A Tribune analysis of ballots cast nationally since 1996 shows more than 2 million potential votes for president have been quietly disqualified because of ballot errors or incompleteness.
The paper’s analysis also shows that the nation’s election system most often restrains or excludes the least educated, inept and poor–regardless of race.
Every four years, the singular goal to select a president is undertaken through thousands of independent and fragmented election systems–2,992 counties and jurisdictions in all.
In state after state, from the poorest to the wealthiest precincts, the nation’s election system is plagued by a checkerboard of localized, unique problems that often defy broad reform efforts.
As a result, at least 13 states don’t know how many people tried to cast a presidential vote last year. A dozen states aren’t sure how many registered voters live within their borders, or how many are really alive.
In Chicago last year, election officials privately decided to create the most crowded punch card ballot in U.S. history, resulting in the highest number of ballot errors in any city. About 122,000 ballots were invalidated in Cook County.
In one South Carolina county, inconsistent counting standards resulted in the disqualification of thousands of incomplete ballots that in another county were automatically corrected and counted.
In Mississippi, where the number of registered voters in each county determines the salary of election officials, voter registration lists are bloated with tens of thousands of people who have registered more than once, moved to another state or who are no longer alive.
Unwilling to sacrifice
Although several reform proposals have received wide support, most taxpayers balk at efforts if reforms require tax increases or come at the expense of other priorities, such as education and fighting crime, election studies show. That may not be true in Illinois however. A recent Tribune opinion poll indicated that 74 percent of Illinois taxpayers favor the use of state funds to help pay for new voting equipment and for programs to reduce errors.
Although Cook County has repaired voting machines that contained design flaws as well as installed computers to verify ballots at polling places, there have been no major reforms statewide, with most proposals already defeated.
Nationally, at least 1,770 election reform proposals have been introduced in statehouses in the past year. More than 1,000 bills have died and only 249 proposals have passed, reports Common Cause, a Washington-based non-profit group that reviewed the nation’s election systems.
Despite these roadblocks, dozens of election experts, as well as former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, have advocated the use of precinct-level ballot counting, which checks for errors and allows voters to make corrections.
Another popular remedy is the use of provisional ballots, allowing voters to cast a ballot even if their name is accidentally dropped from registration lists. Officials would later determine the validity of those ballots. Fourteen states, including Florida and Illinois, do not allow provisional ballots.
And at the heart of most proposals is a plea for funding from the federal government, which has not contributed even a penny to state election costs. So far, federal legislators have squelched all proposals to help states.
Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox summed up many state officials’ realization that problems are more pervasive than the public knows during testimony in March before the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, a non-partisan committee that presented reform proposals to President Bush earlier this year.
Cox said, “As the presidential election drama unfolded in Florida last November, one thought was foremost in my mind: There but for the grace of God go I.”
The problems
Most disqualified ballots can be tracked to the way elections were mismanaged, from poor ballot design to the way counties tallied votes.
Yet machine errors are often pegged as the chief villain that stole away countless votes. For many lawmakers, punch card technology, in particular, has become a convenient scapegoat.
At least a dozen states are pumping in millions of dollars this year to buy new voting machines. Florida has already banned punch card ballots.
But many election experts argue that Florida’s hastily passed measure to install computerized voting equipment will not enhance voter education or provide uniform voting and counting standards.
In Florida, congressional investigators found that faulty voter registration lists, inept and untrained county election officials, and confusing ballot designs were primary problems. Nationally, states with fragmented voting standards experienced substantial error rates no matter how sophisticated the voting machine, federal studies found.
On Monday, the Tribune and a consortium of newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, plan to publish stories detailing a yearlong examination into the Florida vote process.
The unique collaboration among media organizations was undertaken to understand the strengths and flaws of the Florida vote and subsequent recounts, which reflect many of the issues confronting all states.
“One of the consistent misstatements is that machines make errors. What we now know is that machines weren’t the problem. It was people,” said R. Doug Lewis, director of the Houston-based Election Center.
“Everybody keeps looking for nice and neat little packages and how we can just come right in and fix it,” said Lewis, who also is the director of voting systems for the National Association of State Election Directors.
“Well, the Band-Aids need to be on 50 or 60 items and not just one or two.”
In South Carolina
South Carolina is emblematic of the complex relationship between capricious standards and voters, and how machines can fix problems as well as create them.
While many states, including Illinois, disqualified more presidential ballots in raw numbers, South Carolina invalidated the highest percentage of ballots cast. Since 1996, nearly 4 percent of all ballots did not record a valid vote for president. This compares with Georgia at 3.4 percent, New Mexico at 3.4 percent and Illinois at 3.2 percent, the Tribune analysis shows.
“There is a bizarre provision in South Carolina law,” said James Hendrix, executive director of the state’s Election Commission. “It’s been in the law forever, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Similar to a handful of states, South Carolina allows straight-party voting, which enables voters to choose an entire ballot of same-party candidates with one vote. Unique to South Carolina, however, is a mandate that voters must fill out a second ballot for president.
State legislators fear that the convenience of straight-party voting, which may be tied most often to presidential choice, denies votes to opposing party candidates in state races.
For decades, voters have failed to get the message that they must vote separately for state and presidential candidates, said Hendrix, who has been with the state Election Commission since 1974.
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The impact is highlighted through the experience last year of two counties, both of which relied on computerized voting systems, widely viewed as superior to punch cards.
In Williamsburg, nearly 14 percent of ballots did not record a valid vote for president last year.
This ranks as one of the nation’s highest error rates. Problems were primarily blamed on confused voters who failed to submit a second ballet for president.
In Allendale, only 1 percent of ballots were disqualified. Allendale officials installed precinct-level machines that checked ballots for errors. Known as “second-chance technology,” it gives voters the opportunity to correct ballots.
Residents of both rural counties have similar economic and educational backgrounds, state and U.S. census data show.
These two counties, which echo the experiences of dozens of counties nationally, underscore what may be the best solution to capturing the most votes: Allow voters to correct mistakes.
While Hendrix and Lewis are among a dominant cadre of election officials advocating more voter education and increased use of precinct-level verification systems, there are many opponents too.
In Chicago, Republicans have been reluctant to approve second-chance technology that flags undervotes as potential errors–instances when a vote is not registered in a particular race.
Many Republicans have privately said that efforts to allow voters to correct ballots would favor Democrats, whose demographic voter base draws more heavily from low-income citizens with less formal education.
A Cook County Circuit Court judge ruled in August that verification machines could be used in Chicago and suburban Cook County.
Election officials, who saw a dramatic drop in error rates, say the machines will be installed in time for next year’s primary elections.
The human component
The epicenter for elections in Jefferson County, Miss., is a room not much bigger than a walk-in closet that serves as a lunchroom for secretaries at noon and a meeting place for election commissioners at night.
In this tiny space, equipped with a brown folding table, a 13-inch television, a five-drawer file cabinet and an off-brand computer, decisions are made by five election commissioners who determine who among the county’s 8,385 residents is eligible to vote.
Just three times a year, the part-time employees–all retirees–pore through newspaper obituaries, returned jury summons and even scribbled notes taken from word of mouth about who has moved away, looking for names to delete from the county voter rolls.
It is a tedious, time-consuming process, a practice susceptible to error and capricious judgment. The way votes and voters are counted in this county is emblematic of the antiquated procedures in hundreds of counties nationally. Virtually every county has its own idiosyncrasies that can sway elections.
While many election reforms are aimed at use of voting technology, such as elimination of punch card machines, Mississippi illustrates that a primary component, and often the most neglected one, is human.
“We have dead people on our voter registration lists,” said David Blount, spokesman for the Mississippi secretary of state’s office. “We’re trying to correct it, but right now we don’t know how many voters are in each county.”
In fact, Jefferson and dozens of other counties still show more registered voters than residents of legal voting age, according to 2000 census records.
Some counties, including Jefferson, are so poor that until two years ago, voter rolls were handwritten in 48 cloth binders. When it was learned that someone had died, left the county or gone to prison, the name was crossed out in red ink.
“I’m not going to say that we have a lot of fraud going on, but there is [voter registration] inflation in a few counties, and it is not something we want to see,” said Mississippi Secretary of State Eric Clark.
Blaming commissioners
The problem along with the blame has rested solidly with the election commissioners, mostly retired residents elected every four years by a handful of voters who, for the most part, have no idea what the commissioners are supposed to do.
Until this year with a change in law, commissioners’ per diem pay was determined by how many registered voters were on the roll.
“The old formula was a disincentive for the commissioners to do their work,” said Rep. Thomas Reynolds, chairman of the Legislature’s election committee and sponsor of several voter reform bills.
Pay is now centered on population levels. Under the new formula, part-time commissioners think their $4,000 annual pay will be cut by one-third.
“If you ask me, we aren’t paid enough as it is, especially compared to other elected officials,” said Barney Rankin Sr., chairman of the Jefferson County election commissioners.
Full reform also is a financial issue.
To conduct a statewide reregistration would cost an estimated $4.6 million, money that is unavailable in cash-strapped Mississippi. The alternative has been to establish a voluntary registry that would enable Clark’s office to provide up-to-date data to counties attempting to clean up their rolls.
Even that system is not working well.
The state identified about 140,000 suspicious names and in 1998 sent that list to the counties, but Clark acknowledges there has been no follow-up to determine how many rolls are currently up to date.
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COMING MONDAY. The results of a yearlong examination of Florida ballots in the presidential election.