-Caveat Lector- July 17, 2001 Study Says 2000 Election Missed Millions of Votes By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE New York Times A look at the controversial overseas absentee vote, and its possible impact on the 2000 Election. A new study of the 2000 presidential election has found that 4 million to 6 million votes of the 100 million cast last November were not counted. The survey cited faulty voting equipment, confusing ballots, voter error and problems at polling places, including long lines, short hours and inconvenient locations. The study, released yesterday by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology, did not try to determine whether the lost or ruined votes would have changed the outcome of the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The estimate of lost votes is at least twice as high as one released earlier this month by House Democrats, who said that about two million votes, or nearly 2 percent of the total, had not been counted. More than eight months after Election Day, voting experts are still sorting through the aftermath of one of the closest presidential races ever. Yesterday's report is one of several expected in the next several weeks that will examine what went wrong and make recommendations to guide Congress and local governments as they seek to avoid the pitfalls of 2000. While some analysts say time is running out to enact changes that could be in place by the elections in 2002, the bipartisan sponsors of a bill expected to be voted on in the House Science Committee this week are hoping the M.I.T.-Caltech study will give their bill new urgency. The bill would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal laboratory, and state and local election officials to set new technical standards for voting equipment. The academic study concluded that many of the mechanical and human problems experienced last November could be solved if counties eliminated punch cards and lever machines and bought optical-scan equipment, in which voters use pencils to fill in circles, as on standardized tests. The best such optical-scan equipment, the study said, counts ballots at the precinct level and kicks them back to voters if they have been filled out incorrectly. Other studies have reached the same conclusion. "The U.S. can lower the number of lost votes in 2004 by replacing punch cards and lever machines with optical scanning," the report said. It also said counties needed to upgrade their voter registration systems, chiefly by consolidating their registration lists in single databases that are available by computer at each precinct. And it endorsed provisional ballots, which allow a voter to vote even if his registration is in question and to have the ballot counted later. Nineteen states now use provisional ballots. Such changes in the nation's election system could cost about $400 million a year. The report said the nation's 3,000 counties spent $1 billion on election administration in 2000. "We view the price of these reforms. $4 per voter per year, as insurance: insurance against problematic elections in the future, insurance that each vote will be counted," the report said. The report was the result of a six- month examination of the nation's voting system by a team of computer scientists, mechanical engineers and social scientists from the two universities, the nation's premier technical institutes. The goal of their continuing project, financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is to make recommendations about how computing technology can best be harnessed to improve elections. No system is fool-proof, the scientists said. Jehoshua Bruck, an electrical engineer at Caltech, joked that the perfect system would read a voter's mind while she imagined a picture of the White House. Short of that, Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at M.I.T., acknowledged that so far, the two institutes had determined that one of the two best solutions was low-tech, the hand-counted paper ballot. Just as reliable, the report said, are the optical-scan machines that count ballots at the precinct level and give voters a second chance if they make a mistake. The scientists were skeptical of voting over the Internet. The Internet is too vulnerable to large-scale fraud, they said. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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