The Congressional Black Caucus and the AFL-CIO have both made reform of the country's election machinery a top priority. A number of committees and commissions--such as the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford--have already formed to propose remedies for the nation's election practices. Congress is awash in bills, including one co-sponsored by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey--neither of whom is known for his commitment to good government. And at least a dozen states are deliberating action.
All this attention is certainly to the good, because it suggests thatsome kind of legislation will come out of last November's travesty inFlorida--legislation that will make it more likely, in former VicePresident Al Gore's immortal words, that "every vote is counted." Butmany Democratic proponents of election reform have been hypnotized bythe experience of Florida, where faulty voting machines seemed todictate the final outcome. They have made the machines themselves theagents of disenfranchisement. "America's voting system needs anoverhaul," declared Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. "Butterflyballots, punch-card machines, and other outdated systems havedisenfranchised too many Americans in this and other elections." Whilethey don't say so out loud, many Democrats think that by replacingvoting machines with the most up-to-date computerized scanners, theywill not only make every vote count but solidify a Democratic majority.
Sadly, they're wrong on both counts. It's important to get rid ofmachinery that confuses voters, but replacing punch cards by itselfwon't solve the technological problem; and the problem of defectivetechnology may not be as widespread as the situation in Florida wouldsuggest. Election reform will help democracy, but it may not provide thepanacea that many Democrats--still nursing their wounds from lastNovember--hope for. Anyway, for Democrats the more pressing problems arepolitical: Turnout is low, obstacles to registration can be high, andwhen an election is close, Republican officials can take measures thatsuppress minority voting.
Recently, the most common Democratic election-reform initiative hasbeen to ban punch-card ballots. Democrats in Texas, North Carolina,Tennessee, and Oregon have already introduced bills; and there arelawsuits in Florida and Indiana. "No general election ballot shall beused which requires the voter to punch out a hole with a stylus or othertool," reads a proposed North Carolina statute.
There's also action at the federal level. At her first newsconference as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, TexasRepresentative Eddie Bernice Johnson called on Congress to replace thepunch-card machines. And there is an obvious case for doing this: InFlorida, Georgia, and Illinois, voters who used punch-card technologyhad much higher error rates than voters who used optical scanners.Still, it is a mistake to focus on punch cards.
The worst instance of votes being discarded because of machine orvoter error was in Illinois, not Florida. Illinois counties that usedpunch-card ballots had an error rate of 4.08 percent, while those thatused optical scanners with error correction had error rates of 0.88percent. (Error-correction technology warns voters if they have notvoted for president or if they have voted for more than one candidate inany category.) In Chicago punch cards were used and the error rate was7.06 percent; it was even higher in black and Latino precincts.According to a Washington Post survey, in 51 precincts with a 90 percent or higher concentration of black or Latino voters, one in six ballots was not marked for president. In nearby well-to-do and primarily white DeKalb and McHenry Counties, where voters used error-correcting optical scanners, the error rate was one in 300 ballots.
But look below the surface of these results and you'll find that morethan punch-card technology is at fault. In the 1996 presidential race,the error rate in Cook County was only 2.7 percent. In 2000 it was 6.3percent. What made the difference was a 1997 law passed by theRepublican state legislature. For one thing, the law bannedstraight-ticket voting, a practice followed by many minority voters. In1996 Cook County voters could just punch a straight Democratic ticketwith one stroke; in 2000 they had to make hundreds of individualchoices. That was probably the cause of the increase in error rate,which occurred primarily in those minority precincts where voters weremore likely to vote a straight ticket.
The law also forbade Cook County from using the error-correctiontechnology it had purchased for the punch-card system after the 1996election. If Cook County had used this technology, and ifstraight-ticket voting had been permitted, the county's error rate wouldvery likely have been lower than the national average of 2.6 percent,even with a punch-card system. The Republicans claimed they were tryingto prevent Cook County voters from holding an advantage over voters whohad punch-card systems, but their real aim was to squelch the minorityvote in Chicago. And they succeeded.
Some Democrats have argued that punch-card systems need to bereplaced by optical scanners, but the Illinois results demonstrate thatwhat really matters is not how votes are entered, but whether there iserror correction. While wealthy counties that used this technology witherror correction threw out less than one in 100 ballots, predominatelyblack East St. Louis--which couldn't afford error correction along withtheir optical scanners--recorded an error rate of one in 12. Similarly,in Florida's predominately black and poor Gadsden County, where votersused optical scanners without correction, one in eight ballots wasthrown out. In Tallahassee, where error correction was used, fewer thanone in 100 ballots were discarded. Optical scanners, yes; but only witherror correction and sufficient poll workers to provide guidance tovoters.
Some reformers have focused on a different technologicalfix--direct-recording electronic devices that have touch screens. Butthese may not even be preferable to punch cards. You can't vote for twocandidates for the same job with this technology, but voters arebewildered by its novelty. In a study of voting in the past fourpresidential elections, MIT political scientist and voting expert Stephen Ansolabehere found that voters made about the same number of mistakes with this technology as they did with punch cards that lacked error correction.
To conclude: In many areas of the country, the best solution may beto add error correction to existing systems, as Chicago did, ratherthan buy the fanciest technology. And for that to work, we must havestate and county political systems that encourage people to vote. Thebest voting technology can be subverted by legislators determined tomake its use difficult.
In the wake of Florida, many Democrats have also assumed thatminority voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are the ones mostoften victimized by antiquated election technology. As they look to2002, Democrats expect that if they can get new machines, they willsharply increase the vote for Democratic candidates. Florida, of course,inspired this conviction. If the recount had included all the votes thatthe machines rejected but that were clearly intended for one candidate,Gore would have won the state. But Florida may turn out to be somethingof an anomaly.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association forthe Advancement of Colored People have filed suit in Illinois, Georgia, and Florida. These are states where older punch-card machines--combined with a shortage of election officials and with partisan attempts to drive down black turnout--clearly robbed Democrats of votes. Democrats in Missouri are trying to reform voting procedures in St. Louis, where blacks were discouraged from voting by long lines and by registration lists that didn't include their names. But political scientists and journalists have not come up with other states where the Democratic and minority vote was suppressed deliberately by partisans or inadvertently by flawed technology.
When two political scientists, Stephen Knack and Martha Kropf,surveyed existing voter technology to see whether the least accuratemachinery is concentrated among minorities and the poor, they found thatFlorida, where punch-card technology was concentrated among minorityvoters, was the exception rather than the rule. Knack and Kropfdiscovered that, nationwide, 31.9 percent of whites and 31.4 percent ofblacks live in counties using punch-card technology, and that punchcards are more likely to be found in wealthier counties than in poorerones--in other words, the very opposite of what many Democrats assume.
While Knack and Kropf don't distinguish the kinds of punch-cardsystems in use or consider whether minorities and the poor suffer from acombination of technology and political subversion (as in Chicago),their study nevertheless suggests that the conclusions liberals drewfrom the Florida experience about rampant voter discrimination may havebeen unwarranted. Reforms are certainly needed, but they won't bythemselves create a new Democratic majority.
In Congress two principal bills are gathering support. A billsponsored by New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer and KansasRepublican Senator Sam Brownback would spend $250 million per year overfive years to help states and localities buy new equipment and trainpoll workers. The McConnell-Torricelli bill is similar but wouldallocate only $500 million over five years. According to Curtis Gans ofthe Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, the McConnell-Torricelli bill stands the best chance of becoming the basis for legislation, because McConnell himself is the chairman of the Rules Committee, which would have to report out any election-reform legislation. And even though it is by far the stingier of the two bills, it would still be a step forward.
But the most important battle over election reform will occur in thestates. When faced with any measures that will increase minority (andtherefore Democratic) votes--from new error-correcting technology tosame-day voter registration--Republicans invariably raise questions. Asthe debate over election reform begins, many Republicans are trying totie measures banning punch-card ballots or funding new poll workers tomeasures that will prevent what they claim (without any justification)to be an epidemic of voter fraud. Their purpose is to cancel whatevergains might accrue for Democrats, but the effect is often to violate thevoting rights of minorities. On January 31, for instance, the Republicanmajority in Wisconsin's lower house passed a bill that would providemoney for new voting machines but also require each voter to present aspecial state-issued identification card at the polls. (They wanted torepeal Wisconsin's same-day registration but didn't quite have thevotes.) In North Carolina, Republican legislators are sponsoring asimilar bill banning punch-card ballots but also requiring photoidentification. These bills would reduce voter error, yet they wouldreduce the number of voters, too.
The Republicans are trying to exploit the Democratic obsession witheliminating punch-card ballots to effect what they say is a compromise.Democrats have to bear in mind that Chicago, not Florida, is the realdanger. The problem is not simply replacing antiquated machinery; it'sdefending the voting rights of those groups most likely to benefit fromthe new machinery. The goal is to get an accurate count, indeed, butalso to encourage voting and expand the electorate. In the end, it'sabout politics and democracy, not technology.
