New Focus on Flaws in Punch-Card System
nytimes.com
Rebecca Mercuri, the president of the consulting firm Notable Software and an authority on electronic voting tabulation, said: "There's such pressure to get the returns quickly. You can run the punch cards through at a high rate of speed, print out the computerized report, assume it to be correct, and get the results broadcast on the 11 o'clock news."
For that speed, the machines sacrificed accuracy. "With any marginal card, the card reader says, `I'm going to throw that out,' " Ms. Mercuri said. It does not mean that a voter did not vote a certain way, just that the machine cannot be sure, whether because of chad — as the paper punch squares are known — or some other technical issue. "It's a false negative and it needs to be relooked at manually," she said.
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The fact that every run through a punch-card machine results in a different count, as incompletely detached chads fall out, is troubling, but it has seldom affected the outcome of an election. Election administrators were relieved that while counts were always wrong, they were wrong in a consistent way.
"It's almost a certainty that every recount you do that both candidates will pick up votes," said Tony Sirvello, elections administrator for Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston.
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An analysis of the 1996 presidential election by The New York Times found that counties using punch cards reported hundreds of thousands more unvoted ballots — a potential indicator of counting problems — than those using technologies like optical scanning and lever machines.
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The 14 counties in Florida that use punch cards showed especially large rates of ballots with uncounted presidential votes this year — 3.9 percent of the ballots in those counties, compared with 1.5 percent in the counties using optical scanning. Some of that could be attributable to confusing ballot design, some to voter confusion and some to machines' counting irregularities. |
