Is This Any Way To Vote?

By Richard Lacayo

It was 10 O'clock on election night two weeks ago, 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 Paulding 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 Bush-Gore debacle 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. American political campaigns may be marvels of scientific polling and precision focus groups. Then comes Election Day and a piece of damp cardboard.

You can say this for the ongoing struggle over Florida--it has forced people to notice that U.S. voting methods are not exactly state of the art. About 2% of all ballots in presidential elections, for example, 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, as we've learned in the past two weeks, 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, trailing instant prestige as descendants from the same tabulating process used by the computers of that day. They were also 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. In 1988, a report by the National Bureau of Standards, a federal agency, recommended that punch cards be abandoned everywhere. William Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, recalls a test run in which just 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," says Gardner. "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 stands 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.

But voting on your home computer is a distant prospect, largely because the security issues for that scenario are hardest to solve. Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc., a Washington political consulting firm, says the promoters of Internet voting still haven't settled the main concern, which is "making sure a ballot is coming from the person authorized to cast it and arriving at the county election office in the same shape it started out in. There are a lot of 15-year-old hackers."

In March, Arizona's Democratic Party primary offered the nation's first binding election to use the Internet. Though it was also possible to cast ballots at polling places and through the mail, nearly 36,000 voters, 40% of the total turnout, chose to vote via the Internet, many of them at home or at work. (Al Gore beat Bill Bradley with 78% of the vote.) Turnout reached record numbers, but there were frustrations with logging on and frozen screens. Predominantly white districts preferred to vote by computer, while minority voters more often stayed with traditional methods.

Other high-tech methods of voting have been suggested. Gene Brassil, who has designed systems for Lucent and Bell Atlantic, spent the better part of this year trying to convince election officials and legislators that the future belongs to voice-verification technology. His company, VoiceVoting.Com, based in Donner Grove, Ill., promotes a system that could make possible voting by phone. Voters would first establish a digitally encoded "voice print" by speaking into a microphone when they register. But the technology isn't yet proven, and the cost--between $4 and $6 per vote initially--is way beyond even the most expensive optical-scanner systems now in use.

While some seek a technological solution, others are looking for ways to alleviate the inconvenience of having to travel to a crowded polling place in order to vote. Oregon this year tried all mail-in ballots for the first time. Voters could send in their ballots anytime up to the Friday before Election Day; after that the ballots had to be brought personally to election centers or designated drop-off sites. The mail-in system helped boost Oregon's turnout to 63% of the state's eligible voters, in contrast to a 51% turnout nationally. But a hefty 44% of those ballots were deposited in person on Monday and Tuesday alone. The result was crowding at election offices like the one in Portland's Multnomah County, where the line of "mail-in" voters on election night stretched for two blocks. "We have vote-by-mail until the Friday before the election," says Dan Lavey, a Bush campaign consultant and vote-by-mail skeptic. "And from Saturday through Tuesday, we have mildly organized chaos."

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York plans to introduce a bill directing the Federal Election Commission to evaluate various vote systems and propose guidelines for adopting the most effective ones. Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is calling for a commission to do the same. A similar bill in the House is sponsored by Republican Jim Leach of Iowa and Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio, who almost lost his seat in 1988 because of a poorly designed ballot. Because congressional candidates appeared on the same line as presidential candidates, 79,000 people neglected to cast a vote for Congress.

Americans can take some comfort from the knowledge that most other advanced nations have voting methods at least as shopworn as ours. All of Japan uses paper ballots on which voters write in candidates' names themselves. On the other hand, sometimes the old methods have their points. The ancient Greeks, who invented the tumult of democracy, voted by tossing stones into a bowl: white for yes, black for no--hence "blackballed." There is no recorded problem of "hanging chads," though chipping might have been an issue. Best of all, it was cost effective. Rocks can be reused every year.

--Reported by Melissa August and Anne Moffett/Washington, Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Todd Murphy/Portland, David Schwartz/Phoenix and Ken Shiffman/Concord

TIME.com ON AOL For a Q&A on voting, the Electoral College, who's paying for this recount and more, go to time.com

With reporting by Melissa August and Anne Moffett/Washington, Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Todd Murphy/Portland, David Schwartz/Phoenix and Ken Shiffman/Concord