2000: The Bush-Gore election fiasco
On Dec. 3, 2000, Newsday's lead editorial covered the imperfect balloting systems that led to uncertainty about that year's presidential election result. The Supreme Court would eventually decide in favor of George W. Bush on Dec. 12.
There Must Be a Better Way
Bring Balloting Procedures into the 21st Century
The past few weeks have taught Americans a whole lot more than most of us ever wanted to know about the stress points in our creaky machinery for electing presidents.
Even before anyone went to the polls on Nov. 7, some prognosticators were fretting that genial George W. Bush, the Republican, might win the popular vote but still lose the Electoral College to annoying Al Gore, the Democrat.
Ha! Turns out the critical point is not the Electoral College, but poorly designed ballots and unreliable election technology that left voters confused and frustrated in several states-and pitched Florida into an electoral morass that threatens the legitimacy of the president who will be inaugurated seven weeks from now.
No matter who ends up in the White House, close to half the people who took the trouble to vote for president will think their guy got sandbagged by Florida's electoral quirks. We can't let anything like this happen again anywhere in the country. The states are in charge of elections, but many of them need federal help and a nudge to replace obsolete election hardware and embrace 21st- Century ballot innovations. Congress must take steps to provide that help.
Proving the predictors 180 degrees off on the Electoral College outcome, more voters nationwide pulled a lever, punched a card, blacked out a scannable space or fingered a touch screen next to the vice president's name than the Texas governor's. Gore clearly won the popular vote. Even in Florida, where Democrats are desperately trying to reverse a Republican secretary of state's certification of Bush as the winner, more Floridians may have intended to vote for Gore than for Bush.
But intentions don't always get counted when the polls close. As Florida has been demonstrating daily for almost four weeks now, whether they do or not depends heavily on who's in charge of the tally.
In one Florida county, for instance, Republicans were so anxious to make sure their out-of-town voters got absentee ballots that they reportedly wrote in identification numbers the voters themselves were supposed to provide on the application form. Meanwhile, in other counties, Democrats fought to count "pregnant" or "dimpled" chads on ballots that hadn't been punched all the way through. When it comes to red tape and hardware, the system should do more to save voters from themselves.
Modernize the Balloting Process
So where do we start reforming? Maybe with Al Gore's mantra, self-serving though it may be: The purpose of voting is to determine the will of the people, and that means counting as many votes as possible. More to the point, it means designing ballots and voting mechanisms that will enable voters to express their will with a minimum of risk that their intentions will be misconstrued or ignored.
To some reformers, the very idea of the Electoral College is an affront to the people's will: Why not just elect the president by popular vote? The polls had barely closed last month before Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York's Democratic senator-elect, announced she favored a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral-vote system. But it won't happen: Small states whose electoral clout is enhanced by the current system have enough votes to block ratification of such an amendment even if it could win two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate.
There might be an outside chance of modifying the Electoral College to reflect the popular vote more closely. But no matter how the raw vote is eventually sliced and diced, the crucial task remains the same: to determine with maximum accuracy how many votes each candidate won. And the closer the election, the more urgent this task becomes.
Don't expect a one-size-fits-all solution from Washington for this problem. As Florida has been reminding us, elections are basically the states' turf and counties are normally responsible for drawing up ballots and deciding what equipment to buy.
Here are the mechanisms we're working with now and some of their pros and cons:
Punch Cards: Florida's experience this year suggests that these systems-which prevail in 37 percent of the nation's voting precincts-are living on borrowed time. Even apart from the butterfly ballots some Palm Beach voters found baffling, many other voters failed to make clean punches that counting machines could read. The result: excruciating angels-dancing-on-the-head-of- a-pin debates about how many corners of a chad had to be detached before a vote should be counted.
Optical Scanners: By contrast, this method-familiar from the SAT and other multiple-choice tests and used in about 25 percent of the country-may be more accurate. Experts say the proportion of punch-card ballots failing to register a choice for president was way higher than the figure for optically scanned ballots.
Pull-the-Lever Machines: Don't ask; if you vote in New York, you already know. The machines here are obsolete and sometimes balky; the manufacturer stopped building new ones in 1978 and ceased producing replacement parts 10 years later. Like punch cards, this is 19th- Century technology. But similar machines are still used in 22 percent of precincts nationwide. Votes must be tallied at each machine and then added up, whereas punch cards or scanned ballots can be easily transported and counted at a central location.
Electronic Screens: About 7 percent of all precincts use computer keyboards or ATM-style touch screens that can be programmed, for instance, to let voters change their minds and prevent them from spoiling their ballots by marking them for more than one candidate-as they can and do with punch cards and optically scanned ballots. California's sprawling Riverside County spent $ 14 million this year to replace its optical- scanner system with 4,500 touch-screen machines; it claims the new system has eliminated invalid ballots, speeded up counting and reduced printing costs.
Paper Ballots: These are still used in about 3 percent of the country. They're OK if you don't need to count a lot of them in a hurry.
Mail Ballots: Oregon went to all-mail balloting this year. Voters seemed to accept it-turnout was up almost 18 percent from two years ago, but the results were way too slow in coming.
Internet Voting: A Long Island company, Election. com of Garden City, set up an Internet system for Arizona Democrats to hold their presidential primary this year and claims a big boost in turnout over 1996 as a result. But officials in most states remain leery of online voting because they see potential problems with security and privacy. A California task force on Internet voting concluded this year that "additional technical innovations are necessary before remote Internet voting can be widely implemented." If you think Florida is a mess now, wait until some malicious hacker starts playing with a whole state's vote count.
Let a Commission Figure It Out
Given the array of systems already in use and the autonomy of the governments empowered to choose among them, the most sensible proposal for reform so far is the one offered by New York's soon-to-be-senior Democratic senator, Charles Schumer. He would give the Federal Election Commission $ 10 million to analyze all of the above methods of voting and then some, then figure out how to make voting "as accurate, convenient and accessible as possible." But he wouldn't stop there; his bill would authorize $ 250 million in matching grants for states to implement the FEC's recommendations.
Would this put the federal government in the position of dictating what equipment states could buy? Not if it's done right. The FEC might, for example, set minimum standards for accuracy and let counties choose which product to use. States should be free to set higher standards. Since counties would be spending their own money as well as Washington's, they'd have incentive to hold costs down but still meet minimum standards.
Less confusing ballots and more reliable machinery won't prevent close elections, of course. But they should make it easier to figure outwhat the voters actually intended. With Florida's example staring us in the face, how can we not make the effort?
