It was 10 o'clock on election night two weeks ago, and poll watchers in the small Georgia town of Dallas had a problem. The weather was humid and rainy. Now their vote-counting machine was rejecting thousands of punch-card ballots because the cardboard had warped in the damp night air. What to do? Break out the blow-dryers! "As weird as it sounds, it's standard procedure," says Fran Watson, election superintendent for Paulding County, where Dallas is located. "We blow a hair dryer over them, and then they'll go through."
Three cheers for democracy in action. But should the future of free elections rest on the continuing popularity of big hair? The one heartwarming lesson from the Bush-Gore debacle is supposed to be that every vote counts. The less comforting lesson is that a lot of votes don't get counted. Thanks to the spectacularly imperfect voting methods in use around the U.S. - scribbled paper, antique voting machines and those finicky punch cards - hundreds of thousands of ballots are discarded each year. American political campaigns may be marvels of scientific polling and precision focus groups. Then comes Election Day and a piece of damp cardboard.
You can say this for the ongoing struggle over Florida - it has forced people to notice that U.S. voting methods are not exactly state of the art. About 2% of all ballots in presidential elections, for example, are marked for more than one candidate or for none, mostly as a consequence of voter confusion. This year that would have been more than 2 million votes. The chaos, as we've learned in the past two weeks, extends to the counting process as well. In New Mexico, a 500-vote discrepancy was traced to a vote counter's sloppy handwriting: the number 620 was misread as 120.
Can't we do any better? It might be easier to reform the system if there were a system, but the Constitution left election procedures to the states. They in turn have mostly passed the responsibility down to the counties and cities, some 3,000 of them, which choose their preferred methods and pay for them. It's the paying part that is often the stumbling block. "If your choice is between new voting machines and a road grader," says Arkansas secretary of state Sharon Priest, "it's no contest."
The adoption of a uniform national voting technology might be a good idea, but it's something almost no one expects to see. For one thing, it would require poor districts and rich ones to agree on what is affordable. "The states are rightly in charge," says Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonpartisan research group. But while Gans and other experts don't support a uniform nationwide voting method, they do favor measures such as design standards for all ballots. Ballots at every polling place could have a standard type size and style and be marked in the same spots for each office.
For now, however, voting around the country is a patchwork of flawed and often antiquated methods. For more than a century, voting techniques have paralleled the stages of the Industrial Revolution. Big metal voting machines, products of the age of iron and steel, were first used in New York State in 1892. Then as now, voters simply pulled down a lever beside each candidate's name. That permits faster and more legible counts than paper ballots. (A slow count had been one of the issues in the disputed Tilden-Hayes election of 1876.) By the 1960s, half of all voters used them.
But the machines were the steam engines of democracy, weighty and expensive. It was at the peak of their popularity, in 1964, that nimble cardboard punch cards arrived, trailing instant prestige as descendants from the same tabulating process used by the computers of that day. They were also cheaper than the old machines, which meant localities could buy more of them to reduce long lines at polling places. By now the punch cards are the most common election device, used by 34% of voters, and the old machines have gone out of production.
But punch cards introduce their own problems. Holes that are incompletely punctured by the voter can baffle the counting machines. Those problems led Wisconsin to ban the cards in the 1990s, just as New Hampshire had done in 1986. In 1988, a report by the National Bureau of Standards, a federal agency, recommended that punch cards be abandoned everywhere. William Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, recalls a test run in which just five cards were put through a counting machine three times - and produced three different counts. "It was not the most comforting feeling when you had to do a recount with punch cards," says Gardner. "We often had to decide how much light going through a tear would be enough to rule that it was a vote for the candidate. Even some winning candidates just felt bad about the process."