(Thursday Update: They’re doing a bit of crowing over the Electionline.org report in Ohio, and a Utah official is giving his state’s polling effort a B-plus. Pennsylvania didn’t fare quite so well.)
A state-by-state report issued this morning by Electionline.org, a non-partisan watchdog group, offers a Clintonian assessment of whether the recent midterm elections can be deemed a success despite “plentiful” problems with technology: It depends, says the group, on what your definition of success is.
Despite that hedging, proponents of electronic voting machines will find little comfort in this 31-page analysis by Electionline, which is releasing its sobering take four weeks after Election Day press coverage that highlighted untold anecdotal problems at the nation’s polls.
One of the report’s conclusions is that there likely will be a renewed call to ensure that all electronic voting machines produce an auditable paper trail. (California Sen. Diane Feinstein plans wide-ranging hearings on this and other election matters in her role as chair of the Senate Rules and Administration committee, according to a story in this morning’s San Jose Mercury News.)
But was Election Day a success for democracy?
“If, on one hand, success is defined through the societal interest of picking winners, then the answer is yes,” writes Electionline director Dan Chapin. “With the exception of the ongoing dispute in Katherine Harris’ former Congressional district in Sarasota County, Fla. (you can’t make this stuff up) there were few races in which election problems could be seen to have affected the outcome. By that standard – the ability to identify winners and losers and move on with the business of government as a result – then the election was a success.” (Update: NPR has an interview with Chapin.)
That Democrat candidates steamrolled their Republican counterparts in so many races helped mask many of the problems, Chapin acknowledges, but the relative paucity of cliffhangers could only cover up so much.
“On the other hand, if success is to be measured through the individual interest of having each voter’s voice heard, then the answer must be no,” he continues. “As documented in this briefing and elsewhere, voters in a large majority of states encountered difficulties at the polls due to equipment delays, long lines, ballot shortages or other problems.”
Overseen by the Election Reform Information Project and funded by Pew Charitable Trusts through the University of Richmond, Electionline was founded in the wake of the 2000 presidential election nightmare and bills itself as “the nation’s only nonpartisan, non-advocacy Web site providing up-to-the-minute news and analysis on election reform.”
Among the report’s findings:
“According to VotersUnite, a citizen watchdog group that tracked media reports of machine problems during the midterm, hundreds of reports of election-day problems with electronic voting machines should dispel the notion that things went smoothly,” Electionline says.
Florida was once again the epicenter of election ineptitude, as more than 18,000 Sarasota County voters — 1 in 8 — failed to register a vote in the district’s hot Congressional race. Investigations into the missing votes continue.
“A number of groups are concerned that the paperless electronic voting machines lost the votes,” the report states, “while some election officials have said it is possible people either intentionally skipped the race or did not see the race because of poor placement on the electronic ballot.”
Problems uploading data in Arkansas left voter turnout totals in some counties that exceeded the number of registered voters.
More than half of San Francisco’s 561 polling places reported technical problems, which surprisingly was only a 3 percent increase over the June primary.
In Illinois, about 90 of 223 precincts opened late because poll workers couldn’t start voting machines.
In one Ohio precinct all 12 machines crashed just as polls were supposed to open.
Pennsylvania officials are blaming the local ES&S contractor for the failure of one in nine machines in Lawrence County.
There’s plenty more in the report, including general tidbits such as these:
An estimated one-third of voters recorded their preferences using technology that had not been at their polling place just two years previous. The combination of new equipment and ill-trained workers denied an untold number of voters their right to be heard.
How complete has the technological evolution been? The number of counties using lever voting machines has plunged 86% from 2000, while use of the much-maligned punch cards plummeted 98% over the same span, leaving a mere 13 in operation … all in Idaho (a story for another day, I’m sure).
As might be expected, these trends came coupled with a staggering four-fold increase in the use of touch-screen electronic voting machines.
“Machine errors unrelated to poll workers arose as well, the most common complaint being ‘vote flipping,’ in which machines did not record votes accurately for a variety of reasons,” the reports says. “Reports of vote flipping came from all over the country on Election Day, including Georgia, Illinois, Texas, New Jersey and Ohio.”
According to the report, voting machine failures could be broken down into three categories: human error, machine error and unknown.
The latter should be particularly worrisome as we look ahead to the next presidential election in 2008.
And finally, there was this little gem: “Some voters who did not understand electronic voting systems in South Carolina fled without completing their votes, requiring poll workers to finish the job for them.”
Now which is the more disturbing image there? Voters fleeing? Or poll workers stepping up to, ahem, finish the job?
