Dan Geer
Tue, 06 Feb 2001 21:36:25 -0800
This would seem relevant ... http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010206/ts/voting_systems_dc_1.html Tuesday February 6 12:23 PM ET Study: Old Voting Systems May Work Best By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Looking back at Florida's election mess, scientists say the old ways of casting a vote may work best: paper ballots and lever machines give more accurate counts than punch cards or electronic devices. Another key message in a study of U.S. voting technology, released late on Monday, seems to be that the machines are not always the problem. ``We believe that human factors drive much of the 'error' in voting,'' scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) said in a Feb. 1 report to a task force that is studying voting problems in Florida. Florida was the final battleground state in the hotly contested 2000 presidential race, with the outcome ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) more than a month after the Nov. 7 Election Day. There were questions about voting equipment that may have hindered the accurate counting of thousands of Florida votes, notably Palm Beach County's controversial ``butterfly ballot,'' a two-column punch card ballot that confused many voters. Without mentioning the ``butterfly ballot'' specifically in this preliminary report, the scientists wrote, ``Some technologies seem to be particularly prone to over-voting (voting for more than one candidate for a single office), such as the punch card systems implemented in Florida in the 2000 election.'' Wide Range Of Equipment Part of the problem is the wide range of voting equipment used across the United States, starting with the simple paper ballots that were common in much of the country in the 19th century and ending with the direct-recording electronic devices (DREs) that were introduced in some areas in 2000. In between are punch card ballots, lever machines -- in which voters enter a booth and flick switches by their preferred candidates, then finally record their votes by pulling a large lever -- and optically scanned ballots, where voters use pencils to fill in circles beside the candidates they choose. Examining data on election returns and machines from about two-thirds of all U.S. counties over four presidential elections starting in 1988, the scientists found that manually counted paper ballots ``have the lowest average incidence of spoiled, uncounted and unmarked ballots.'' Lever machines and optically scanned ballots were most accurate after paper ballots, the report said, while punch card methods and DREs, which look and operate a bit like automatic teller machines, had ``significantly'' higher error rates. The difference in reliability between the best and worst systems was 1.5 percent, the report said. Part of the difficulty may lie in voters' unfamiliarity with new technology, said the group of social scientists that included experts on computers, politics and economics. ``We don't want to give the impression that electronic systems are necessarily inaccurate, but there is much room for improvement,'' the California institute's Thomas Palfrey said in a statement.