Touchscreen Voting Flawed in Fla.
story.news.yahoo.com
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Touchscreen voting machines didn't perform
as well as devices that scanned paper ballots in this year's Florida
Democratic presidential primary, raising questions about the state's
voting process for the November election, a newspaper reported Sunday.
An analysis of just under half of the ballots from the March 9 election
shows that votes were not recorded for about one out of every 100
people using the new machines, or a 1.09 percent rate of undervotes, the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. An undervote is when a selection
cannot be detected on a ballot.
That's at least eight times the number of undervotes in the same election
on paper ballots marked with pencils and tallied by an optical scanner,
which had a 0.12 percent rate of undervotes, the newspaper reported.
Undervotes were a problem in the contested 2000 presidential election,
in which many Floridians cast their ballots on punch-card machines.
After 36 days of legal wrangling and recounts, George W. Bush won
Florida, and thus the White House, by just 537 votes.
According to a review sponsored by The Associated Press and other
news organizations, about 61,190 of 6.1 million total ballots in that
election were undervotes, or a 1 percent rate.
The state outlawed the punch-card machines after the 2000 election, and
the touchscreen machines were billed as a way to avoid a repeat of the
problems. Fifteen Florida counties now use touchscreen machines.
A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's top
elections official, did not return calls seeking comment Sunday.
The Sun-Sentinel analysis of the March 9 election reviewed nearly
350,000 ballots statewide, or about 44 percent of all ballots cast. The
ballots analyzed had only one choice, selection of a Democratic Party
presidential nominee.
The analysis found optical scan machines counted 12 overvotes in the
March sample, where voters chose more than one candidate. Overvotes
are impossible to cast on touchscreen machines. The media-sponsored
review of the 2000 election found 113,820 overvotes, a 1.9 percent rate.
The newspaper's findings did not surprise officials of Sequoia Voting
Systems and Elections Systems & Software, two companies
manufacturing touchscreen machines sold in Florida.
"The most important thing to take from the (Sun-Sentinel) survey findings
is that both electronic systems and precinct-based optical scan
systems dramatically reduce voter error. ... The Florida numbers
demonstrate a substantive improvement over the 2000 presidential
election," said Alfie Charles, vice president of business development for
Sequoia.
Meghan McCormick, spokeswoman for ES&S, said some voters simply
choose to cast blank ballots.
Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County elections supervisor, said it is
almost impossible to eliminate undervotes because some people will
choose not to vote for any candidate or will make mistakes.
"There is only one perfect voting system," LePore said. "That's the one
that doesn't involve humans." |
