OT: Interesting Reading: No Partisanship Intended...
Ballot woes went well beyond chads
By Jeff Zeleny
Tribune Staff Writer
January 28, 2001
ORLANDO -- More than 1,700 votes that
showed a clear choice in Florida's bitterly
contested presidential election were discarded in
the 15 counties that had the highest rate of
rejected ballots, a Tribune Co. investigation
shows.
An examination of discarded ballots from those
counties found that in 5,000 other cases, apparent
presidential votes were lost because a variety of mistakes made it impossible to
be certain of the voter's intent.
Contrary to popular perception, the highest rates of discarded ballots in Florida's
contentious race for the presidency came from 15 counties that used paper
ballots filled in with pencils, not the counties that used the punch card ballots
that were at the heart of the state's recount controversy, the investigation by
three Tribune Co. newspapers shows.
The findings underscore that the problems with the election went beyond the
controversial punch cards and involved confusing ballot designs, inconsistent
counting methods and election officials who never examined paper ballots
rejected by tabulating machines on Election Day.
The 15,596 discarded paper ballots in the 15 counties, reviewed in a joint
project by the Chicago Tribune, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Orlando
Sentinel, were identified by election officials as so-called overvotes or
undervotes, rejected by counting machines because they contained multiple
votes for president or no vote at all.
Most of the counties in the Tribune Co. study are small, rural and
predominantly Republican, representing just 4.6 percent of the 6.1 million
Florida ballots cast in the Nov. 7 election. But because of flaws associated with
the type of voting equipment used in those counties, they accounted for 8.6
percent of the state's rejected ballots and taken together registered the highest
rates of lost ballots anywhere in Florida.
While all but one of the 15 counties examined were won by George W. Bush,
the study found that most of the disqualified votes were intended for former
Vice President Al Gore. In fact, had canvassing boards tallied those ballots
during Florida's prolonged election battle, Gore may have seen a net gain of 366
votes in these selected counties.
Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and thus the presidency. But the significance of
the potential votes in the ballots reviewed so far cannot be determined without
examining all 180,000 ballots rejected in the state's 67 counties. A consortium
of newspapers, including five from Tribune Co., is preparing to review all of the
rejected ballots. That effort could take months.
In Duval County, about 22,000 punch card ballots were thrown out. Those
ballots, many from predominantly black voting districts in Jacksonville, could
have had a dramatic effect on the overall totals—or almost none at all.
For example, a count of the 10,600 rejected punch card ballots in Miami-Dade
County by The Palm Beach Post earlier this month found fewer than 500
discernible votes—and by a narrow six-vote margin, they favored Bush.
The results of the Tribune Co. investigation add another ironic twist to the
post-election strategies employed by both presidential campaigns. Bush sought
to halt recounts in urban counties such as Miami-Dade, where conventional
wisdom predicted big gains for Gore. And Gore didn't call for recounts in the
small counties that Bush won handily, fearing his Republican opponent would
gain votes.
In any case, many of the state's smallest counties were largely ignored by the
candidates in the burst of legal jockeying that kept the nation waiting 36 days
past the election to know its 43rd president.
Now, as Bush enters his second week in the White House, the question of
potentially lost or gained votes is merely academic. But the ballot review
revealed a litany of mistakes made by voters, underscoring the confusing
patchwork of the way democracy really works across Florida and throughout
the U.S.
The findings raise critical questions as election reform emerges as a key
political issue in statehouses across the country and in Congress. Also brewing
are lawsuits filed by civil rights organizations in Illinois, Florida and elsewhere
asking judges to ban certain types of voting methods, including punch card
ballots, to ensure that voting procedures are consistent.
The ballot inspection, conducted Jan. 4-23 by the three Tribune Co.
newspapers, covered the 15 Florida counties that use paper ballots completed in
pencil and tabulated by optical scan counters at county voting headquarters. In
26 other Florida counties, paper ballots are also used, but the voter feeds the
ballot directly into a tabulating machine.
The two paper ballot systems produce starkly different results.
If a voter in Tallahassee makes a mistake, for example, the counting machine
automatically spits the ballot back into the voter's hand, providing a second or
even a third chance to get it right. The voting system has an error rate of less
than 1 percent.
But 25 miles away in Gadsden County, the only predominantly black Florida
county, no second chances are given because county officials say they can't
afford to buy optical scanners for each precinct. Here, 12.4 percent of the
ballots were thrown out Election Day.
The story is much the same throughout most of Florida's hardscrabble
Panhandle, where roadside stands dot the curvy highways, selling sugar-frosted
pecans or Tupelo honey. In such counties as Gadsden and Jackson, Lafayette
and Liberty, a higher percentage of votes were discarded than in southern
Florida counties like Miami-Dade.
Confusing paper ballots
With Florida as a giant theater, the 2000 presidential election provided a
sometimes troublinglook into the way politicians are elected. Formerly obscure
details like the distinction between a precinct-by-precinct tabulating system and
a centrally located tabulating system are likely to become controversial political
issues across the country.
In Florida, the punch card system—also used throughout Illinois and by
one-third of all American voters—sparked complaints of widespread
inaccuracy and fueled bitter debate over the bits of paper called chad, pregnant,
dimpled or otherwise.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of the new president, says he wants to abolish
punch card ballots in his state. By the 2002 election, he hopes all Floridians cast
their votes on paper ballots, which could cost $35 million for new voting
equipment alone.
But in the 24 Florida counties that use punch card ballots, 3.9 percent of the
ballots were discarded, compared with 5.7 percent of the ballots in the 15
counties where paper ballots are tabulated by centrally located optical scan
machines.
Throughout those 15 counties, the Tribune examination found that ballots were
discarded for many reasons. In almost all cases, though, the ballots were
spoiled because of mistakes made by voters.
Many failed to follow instructions. Others followed the instructions too literally.
And many mistakes were attributable to fuzzy directions or a confusing ballot
design.
No matter the mistake, the paper ballots shared a common trait that
distinguished them from the difficult to read punch card ballots: A visual
examination of the paper ballot, in many cases, clearly revealed which
candidate the voter intended to choose.
While Bush and Gore received the bulk of attention in the 2000 presidential
race, eight other presidential candidates also appeared on the ballot in Florida.
Their names—and a space for a write-in selection—apparently created the
most confusion among voters.
In 1996, only four presidential candidates appeared on the Florida ballot. Two
years later, Florida voters approved a state constitutional amendment that made
it easier for minor-party candidates to seek office. The change left election
supervisors scrambling to fit 10 names onto a presidential ballot for the first
time in memory.
"They wanted to put everyone but their coon dog on the ballot," said Lana
Morgan, the elections chief in Lafayette County, who worried that voters would
be misled by the large slate.
Morgan's concerns appeared to be well-founded. In the Tribune Co. review,
nothing accounted for more lost votes than a ballot design in which election
officials split the candidates' names between two columns. More than 4,000
votes for Gore or Bush were thrown out when voters selected one candidate
from the ballot's first column and went on to select a lesser-known candidate's
name from the second column.
Monica Moorehead, a presidential candidate from the Workers World Party,
nullified 1,083 votes for Gore because of the design flaw. Moorehead, a
little-known candidate, received more votes in this small sampling of counties
than she did across the rest of the state.
In 13 of the 15 counties reviewed, Moorehead's name was printed in the
second column on the ballot, just below the name of Constitutional Party
candidate Howard Phillips. On Election Day, 2,416 voters picked Gore in the
first column and Moorehead or Phillips in the second column. That disqualified
the ballots as overvotes because the machine detected more than one vote in
the same race.
In addition, 1,852 voters chose Bush in the first column and Moorehead or
Phillips in the second column.
Had only the first column's votes been counted, the invalidated ballots would
have swung a net 564 votes to Gore in the 15 counties.
But the confusion didn't end with the two-column ballot design.
Literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, who reviewed the ballots at the
newspapers' request, found rules printed on the ballots that he believed were
unnecessary and complex.
He said the explanation that voters are selecting electors, not the candidates
themselves, could puzzle voters. Also confusing, he said, was the inexact
placement of circles by the candidates' names and the lack of directions
warning voters that the ballot's first column did not contain all presidential
candidates.
"Some of the things here are not just problems that would throw someone with
literacy problems," said Shanahan, director of the Center for Literacy at the
University of Illinois-Chicago. "I could imagine a good reader would find this
confusing."
The designer of the two-column ballot—Hart InterCivic, an Austin,
Texas-based firm—said it was following a format sent out by the Florida
secretary of state's office and a state election law written for old-fashioned
paper ballots. The law specifies the size of print for a candidate's name and
what instructions must be included at the top of the ballot.
"There wasn't any way to get that many candidates into a single column," said
Jerry Meadows, a Hart InterCivic senior vice president.
The double-column ballots were approved by county officials before the
election.
Bradford County Elections Supervisor Terry Vaughan said he asked Hart
officials during a pre-election ballot review about putting "go to the next
column" at the bottom of the first row, but the company said such language
might confuse voters.
Other Florida election supervisors said they didn't realize the two columns of
candidates would be a problem until election night, when a string of voter
questions alerted poll workers that the ballot was unclear.
Despite the ballot company's contention that there was no way to fit 10
candidates and a space for write-in candidates in one column, Lake County
election officials, who designed their own ballots, managed to do so. Perhaps as
a result, just 2 percent of Lake County's discarded ballots were overvotes with
more than one presidential candidate selected. In the other counties, as many
as 31 percent of the discarded ballots had votes for Moorehead or Phillips in
addition to Bush or Gore.
Colorado and Washington, two states that had 10 presidential candidates on the
ballot, also fit all the candidates into one column. Election supervisors in those
states said it's a cardinal sin of ballot design to split candidates into two
columns.
"That's just something experience has taught us you don't do," said John
Pearson, senior assistant director for elections for Washington. "You don't split
them by page or by column because you are inviting overvotes when you do
that."
An array of errors
In Florida, county election supervisors are responsible for designing ballots and
conducting virtually every aspect of the election. The Tribune Co. inspection of
paper ballots, some of which were coffee-stained and wrinkled, torn and folded,
uncovered a wide array of errors that election experts say would be found in
virtually every county in America if a race was as close as Florida's
presidential election.
"This is not an exact science," said R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the
Election Center in Houston, a national training center for election officials.
"This is one where you have such a high degree of human interaction and a
huge chance for human error that we may be able to get most things fixed after
we see them enough, but we're probably not going to be able to get all of the
things fixed."
Florida law instructs election officials to determine the voter's intent when
counting ballots. Yet in scores of cases, ballots were discarded even when the
intent was clear. Some examples:
In Okeechobee County's Precinct 5, a voter filled in the ballot oval for Gore,
but did so in pen. The counting machine did not detect it, and the vote went
uncounted.
Voters were told to use pencil. Poll workers handed out the proper pencils to
use, and many even included pencils in absentee ballot mailings. Nonetheless,
more than 100 clear votes for Gore or Bush went uncounted in the 15 counties
because voters used pens or markers that could not be detected by voting
machines and never were individually inspected by election officials.
Voters who made mistakes in Bradford County were given white stickers to
cover up their errors. And in Lafayette County, election workers remedied the
problem by filling out duplicate ballots, a legally allowable procedure.
In Suwannee County's Precinct 11, a voter properly penciled in the oval for
Bush, but also filled in the write-in oval and wrote "Bush Cheney."
This voter, like many others, appeared to be confused by the ballot instruction
that said "Write-in Candidate." Taking the direction literally, this voter wrote in
the name of a preferred candidate.
The counting machine in Suwannee, as in other counties, read the write-in as
an improper second vote and rejected the ballot.
While Florida law directs canvassing boards to count ballots that show a voter's
intent, the law doesn't explain how. After the election, decisions on how to
count the votes were left up to canvassing boards in the 67 counties, which
came up with nearly as many different ways of performing the task.
Many counties visually examined and counted the write-in ballots that were
rejected by machines. But some didn't, including Lake and Charlotte, the two
largest counties in the Tribune Co. study.
In all 15 counties, election officials threw out 962 ballots in which voters filled in
the oval for Gore or Bush and also wrote the candidate's name in the write-in
space. Those decisions could have cost Bush 384 votes and Gore 578.
In Charlotte County, 14 absentee ballots were discarded because a counting
machine detected two votes for president. But the second vote didn't exist.
What the counting machine read as a vote was in fact a crease made when the
ballots were folded to be placed in mailing envelopes.
The canvassing board didn't inspect the ballots. In fact, the ballots were not
sorted until the Tribune Co. newspapers filed suit and a circuit judge ordered
the election supervisor to do so.
In Gadsden County's Precinct 2, a voter penciled in votes for Bush and Gore,
but erased the vote for Bush. But counting machines detected the erased vote
as a double vote and rejected the ballot.
In the entire study, 239 votes weren't counted because voters attempted to
erase mistakes on their ballots instead of asking for a new form. Of those,
Bush lost 95 and Gore 144.
Election officials said the pencils given to voters had no erasers. On some
ballots, it appeared voters had tried to wipe their mistakes using nothing but
their dampened fingers.
St. John Precinct: 1 in 4 votes discarded
The highest percentage of spoiled ballots came in Gadsden County, where
more than 1 in 10 votes were discarded. But the confusion was not divided
equally in the north Florida county.
Nearly 1 in 4 ballots were disqualified from the St. John Precinct because
voters didn't follow directions. They either voted for more than one presidential
candidate or didn't properly fill in the circles by the candidate's name.
Vivian Kelly, 81, a retired schoolteacher and Democratic activist who has been
registering voters for two generations, doesn't for a minute believe that voters
intentionally ignored the directions and negated their own votes.
chicagotribune.com
In many cases, she says, they couldn't read them.
"We had a lot of people register to vote at the last minute this summer, but
some of them just didn't know how to vote," said Kelly, who found the ballot
confusing because the list of candidates jumped columns and the political races
spilled onto a second page. "A lot of people didn't turn the ballot over. These
are little things you have to tell people who don't read well."
Before the election, eligible residents were pursued vigorously through
registration drives and seemingly endless mailbox solicitations. But Kelly said
the political activists didn't teach first-time voters how to cast ballots.
Wilbert Caldwell, principal of St. John Elementary School, said he was
surprised to learn that nearly 23 percent of the ballots in the precinct
surrounding his school were discarded because of voter error. Caldwell and
others here said there is a high degree of silent illiteracy, but it's difficult to
measure. Adults only occasionally face situations where their reading abilities
are tested.
Caldwell, who has been teaching in Gadsden County for three decades, said he
voted for Gore. But when he was told the findings of the ballot review, he
wondered whether his ballot was one of the rejected ones.
"They tried to emphasize that every vote counts," said Caldwell, 61, sitting in his
office in the small, red school building. "But come to find out, a lot of them
didn't. I just wish there was a foolproof way to find out if my vote really did
count."
Orlando Sentinel staff writers Roger Roy, Jeff Kunerth, Jim Leusner and
David Damron and Sun-Sentinel staff writers John Maines, Megan
O'Matz and Sean Cavanaugh contributed to this report. |
