-Caveat Lector- http://www.herald.com/content/archive/news/elect2000/decision/025171.htm Published Sunday, December 17, 2000, in the Miami Herald Punch card problems were ignored for years BY PETER WHORISKEY AND JOSEPH TANFANI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Florida elections supervisors continued to use punch-card ballots despite numerous signs over 20 years that they botched thousands of votes and could throw into doubt the outcome of any close race. The 2000 election debacle erupted because these warnings were largely ignored: Thousands of punch-card votes were being rejected every election. In the 1992 and 1996 elections, the earliest for which complete data are available, the presidential votes on more than 20 of every 1,000 ballots were not counted because ballots were either double-punched, unpunched or incompletely punched, a survey of Florida's 12 most populous counties shows. Manufacturers of voting machines knew that ``hanging chad'' was a significant problem throughout the '70s, when the machines became widespread in Florida, patent documents show. Hanging chads prevent the counting machines from accurately recording ballots. Candidates in close races were complaining about ``overvotes'' and ``undervotes'' as far back as the '70s. Sometimes these candidates sued. But canvassing boards and judges typically dismissed their complaints. Two large counties, Brevard and Volusia, recognized the problems with punch cards and switched to ``optical scan'' systems in which voters shade in ovals. The proportion of discarded ballots in these counties dropped from 26 per 1,000 to three or fewer per 1,000. But most of the large counties kept the punch-card ballots, shrugging off evidence that thousands of voters were being silenced in every election. Many of these problems were summarized in a 1988 National Bureau of Standards report that recommended abandoning pre-scored punch-card ballots. The report was distributed to elections offices around the country. The presidential election just months later rendered that federal warning prophetic: One in 12 Miami-Dade voters cast a ballot on which the machine did not find a valid presidential vote. Similar problems erupted in that year's U.S. Senate contest in Palm Beach, Broward and Hillsborough counties. ``The question you have to ask is, `Why did elections supervisors continue with punch cards?' '' said Roy Saltman, the author of the report. ``All the evidence said there was a serious problem.'' Elections supervisors in most large counties say they either did not recognize the ruined ballots as a significant issue or believed that no other voting method was significantly more accurate. Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections David Leahy: ``Until we got to this election, no one ever looked at undervotes or overvotes. I didn't think of them.'' Later, asked about a number of undervote and overvote complaints brought by candidates in Miami-Dade, he said: ``I've always been concerned about hanging chads. It's always been a flaw in the system.'' However, Leahy said he is skeptical of using the optical scan equipment -- because counting ballots at the precinct rather than in a central location raises the possibility of far-flung mistakes or manipulation. The ballots are counted at precincts so they can be rejected immediately if voters make mistakes such as double-punching. ``Optical scan is not utopia,'' he said. ``There's no perfect system. There's no system that's put on the market that prevents a voter from making an error.'' SIGNS MISREAD Elections supervisors have long viewed the rejection of thousands of ballots as a natural part of elections, not as an ominous warning sign. Some people accidentally mark too many candidates on a ballot. These so-called ``overvote'' ballots are not counted. Some people intentionally do not vote in some races, particularly when they lack familiarity with the candidates. These are called ``undervote'' ballots, and they aren't counted either. As a result some elections supervisors and some Republicans argue that the proportion of uncounted ballots in the 2000 presidential election was not unacceptable. ``I don't get it,'' Joan Brock, deputy supervisor of elections in Pinellas County, said of the furor over this year's undervotes. ``Not everyone votes for president, and it wouldn't surprise me to see that two percent of them didn't want to vote for president.'' A closer look at voting records, however, suggests that very few people go to the polls in presidential elections without intending to vote for president, and that thousands of would-be voters every election are thwarted by punch-card ballots. Consider, for example, the experience of Brevard County, the largest Florida county that has used both punch cards and fill-in-the-oval ballots. In 1996, the last presidential election tallied on punch cards, 26 of every 1,000 voters failed to cast a valid presidential vote. In 2000, after the switch to fill-in-the-oval ballots, the proportion fell to fewer than two of every 1,000 presidential ballots cast. ``We knew we had voters out there who were being disenfranchised because of overvotes and undervotes,'' said Gayle Graham, the assistant supervisor of elections in Brevard. ``So we switched. Using a pencil to mark a ballot is just so much simpler. It's like filling in a lottery ticket.'' BETTER SYSTEM Swapping from punch-card ballots to fill-in-the-oval ballots in Volusia County also led to a steep drop in rejected ballots. With punch cards, 26 of every 1,000 voters failed to cast valid presidential votes; after the switch, that number fell to just three of every 1,000. Optical scan systems work better for two reasons, election supervisors in those counties said. First, using a pencil to fill in ovals on a ballot comes naturally to most people. They've done something similar on SAT tests and lottery tickets. Few people ever punch cards with a stylus, aside from when they vote. Second, the fill-in-the-ovals method often has counting machines in every precinct that kick back ballots to voters who overvote, so they can make corrections immediately. ``Voters find the optical scan ballots much easier to use,'' said Deanie Lowe, supervisor of elections in Volusia. ``They are much more user-friendly.'' Punch-card ballot machines became widespread in Florida during the '70s, typically replacing the old closet-sized, lever-operated voting booths. Punch-card salesmen boasted that their voting systems could count votes faster and were easier to store and set up. Almost immediately, however, users of punch-card systems confronted a serious problem -- ``hanging chad,'' patent documents show. One of the first patents for punch-card voting machines, submitted by Votomatic inventor Joseph Harris in 1964, boasted that, by design, ``complete punching out of the chip is insured.'' Four years later, however, another inventor, Ira G. Laws of Tulsa, working for Seismograph Service Corp., recognized the need for more accuracy in punch-card counts, because some voters were not punching completely through the ballot. ``Anyone who worked on these things noticed that every once in a while at least some of the holes will not punch cleanly. It wasn't uncommon at all,'' Laws said in an interview. ``It's not the fault of the voters that the chad does not punch out occasionally. I think it's just inherent in the device.'' He proposed and patented alterations to the stylus that were supposed to avoid such inaccuracies. ``We didn't think we had eliminated the hanging chad problem, but we thought we had made an improvement,'' he said. Twelve years later, after thousands of the punch-card balloting devices were sold around the country, the chads were still hanging. A third inventor, John Ahmann, who testified during the Leon County legal proceedings this year, filed still another plan to fix the Votomatic. His patent identified ``hanging chad'' as ``one of the main detractors of punch card voting.'' He proposed a number of changes to address the problem, including a way to align the punch holes and the cards better to reduce the possibility of dimples and hanging chads. He said many of those features are incorporated into the voting devices of Miami-Dade County, which ordered new equipment in the 1980s. Broward, Palm Beach and other Florida counties have the older equipment, Ahmann said. Even newer equipment, if it's not maintained properly, can cause problems, particularly if the rubber or plastic strips that help pull off chads become worn. ``On any of the machines, if the t-strips are worn to the point where they don't hold the chad, you might get hanging chad,'' Ahmann said. ``They need to be maintained. Depending on how many elections you have and how many times you punch in the same punch position, they can last 20 years or more without replacement of the t-strips.'' The punch card manufacturers were not the only ones noticing the pitfalls of the punch cards. Candidates complained -- even after the design changes the manufacturers made to eliminate problems. Canvassing boards and courts frequently dismissed the complaints, citing issues such as the cost and impracticality of hand counts. CANDIDATE COMPLAINS In 1977, in one of the first Miami-Dade races run on punch cards, a Miami Beach City Council candidate complained to a judge that 710 votes were tossed out because people had punched too many times. The judge dismissed the case. In 1984, David Anderson, a candidate to become Palm Beach County property appraiser filed suit over, among other things, ``hanging chad.'' He lost that legal battle -- on what Anderson says was a technicality -- but now feels vindicated. ``To all of a sudden to say `Oh, we're so surprised by these problems!' -- they're not surprised,'' Anderson said. ``Those Votomatics should have been changed a long time ago.'' In 1991, taxpayer activist Al Hogan lost a seat on the Oakland Park City Council in Broward County by three votes. He appealed to the canvassing board for a recount but lost, even though the board acknowledged hanging chads might have cost him votes. Hogan, now 90 years old, still believes hanging chads undid his candidacy. ``I always felt it was that way,'' he said. ``I'm just about positive I won. I didn't think it was fair all the way through.'' WHO SUFFERS MOST None of this would matter if lost votes affected all candidates equally. But they don't. The use of punch cards in Florida appears to favor Republican candidates at the expense of Democrats, who are much more likely to overvote or undervote, possibly because of socioeconomic factors. Democrat Buddy MacKay believes his 1988 Senate candidacy became a casualty of punch card voting, when he lost by just 33,612 votes out of more than four million cast. About one in five Miami-Dade voters failed to cast a valid vote in that race. ``There was a 200,000 vote undercount in the four largest Democratic counties,'' said MacKay, formerly the state's lieutenant governor. ``It's about the same situation that Al Gore is in.'' MacKay says it's unthinkable that so many Florida counties still use punch-card ballots. ``This was the technology used at the University of Florida when I was there, and that was before the Earth cooled,'' he said. ``If anybody ever focuses on it, it's an outrage. ``We do like to think every vote counts.'' WHY CARDS REMAINED Elections supervisors in Florida's large counties offer various reasons for sticking with punch cards. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore said she thought that past undervote problems had been solved four years ago when the county bought new styluses: ``We thought they were fixed and didn't look anymore,'' she said. Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Pam Iorio said: ``Whether it's punch-card or optical scan . . . what you're accepting going on in elections is, there's a certain amount of voter error.'' She said optical-scan devices, at about $5,700 per precinct, offer only a marginal improvement in accuracy for millions of dollars in expense. Only one elections office among Florida's five largest counties recognized serious problems in the punch-card ballots and sought a change: In memos to the County Commission, Broward's then-Supervisor of Elections Jane Carroll criticized punch cards as antiquated, confusing and inaccurate. For seven years, she tried to switch to the optical scan system. She couldn't get the money. County commissioners fretted that something better would come along and they'd be stuck with an expensive but outdated system. Their stance drew a biting rebuke from Carroll. ``If the theory of waiting to see what will come along in the future had been employed, we would still be on a manual registration system and hand-counting paper ballots brought in by horse-drawn carriages,'' she wrote in a 1993 memo. Carroll blames politics. She says she had the votes lined up for a new system in 1993 until a competitor hired lobbyists to influence commissioners. Carroll, though, was criticized at the time for not seeking bids. ``Literally overnight, support evaporated,'' Carroll said. ``I think it was definitely the lobbying.'' Broward Commissioner Lori Parrish, a Democrat and a consistent opponent of buying new voting technology, said she now regrets her opposition. ``All of us are kicking ourselves in the rear end,'' Parrish said. Copyright 2000 Miami Herald <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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