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About a fourth of Americans vote the same way they take standardized tests or mark lottery tickets - by filling in circles or arrow lines on cards that are read on the spot by optical scanners. "You can have a multitude of people marking ballots at the same time, so you get rid of the waiting lines," says Ed Packard, election administrator in Alabama, where all but three of the state's 67 counties use the method. "And you can program the machines to kick overmarked ballots back to the voter to redo." The scanners also claim an optimal accuracy rate of 99%, but the scanning machines are costly.
Now, at the cyberstage of the Industrial Revolution, the cutting edge of voting is by computer. Around 9% of voters currently use computer touch screens similar to those of atm machines. But the touch-screen systems are still subject to programming crashes, which could be disastrous in the event of a recount. And the Internet? For now, the prospect of Web voting is promising, but some of what it promises is trouble. It opens the way to easy voting at computer stands anywhere - not just at polling places but at every office, school and library. Results could be tabulated instantly. But Internet voting also opens the possibility of election results being stolen by hackers. And if voting were permitted from home computers, it could lead to the worst kind of "digital divide," in which only Americans without computers - meaning the poor and the elderly - have to go out to vote, while others do it from the comfort of home.
But voting on your home computer is a distant prospect, largely because the security issues for that scenario are hardest to solve. Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services Inc., a Washington political consulting firm, says the promoters of Internet voting still haven't settled the main concern, which is "making sure a ballot is coming from the person authorized to cast it and arriving at the county election office in the same shape it started out in. There are a lot of 15-year-old hackers."
In March, Arizona's Democratic Party primary offered the nation's first binding election to use the Internet. Though it was also possible to cast ballots at polling places and through the mail, nearly 36,000 voters, 40% of the total turnout, chose to vote via the Internet, many of them at home or at work. (Al Gore beat Bill Bradley with 78% of the vote.) Turnout reached record numbers, but there were frustrations with logging on and frozen screens. Predominantly white districts preferred to vote by computer, while minority voters more often stayed with traditional methods.
Other high-tech methods of voting have been suggested. Gene Brassil, who has designed systems for Lucent and Bell Atlantic, spent the better part of this year trying to convince election officials and legislators that the future belongs to voice-verification technology. His company, VoiceVoting.Com, based in Donner Grove, Ill., promotes a system that could make possible voting by phone. Voters would first establish a digitally encoded "voice print" by speaking into a microphone when they register. But the technology isn't yet proven, and the cost - between $4 and $6 per vote initially - is way beyond even the most expensive optical-scanner systems now in use.
While some seek a technological solution, others are looking for ways to alleviate the inconvenience of having to travel to a crowded polling place in order to vote. Oregon this year tried all mail-in ballots for the first time. Voters could send in their ballots anytime up to the Friday before Election Day; after that the ballots had to be brought personally to election centers or designated drop-off sites. The mail-in system helped boost Oregon's turnout to 63% of the state's eligible voters, in contrast to a 51% turnout nationally. But a hefty 44% of those ballots were deposited in person on Monday and Tuesday alone. The result was crowding at election offices like the one in Portland's Multnomah County, where the line of "mail-in" voters on election night stretched for two blocks. "We have vote-by-mail until the Friday before the election," says Dan Lavey, a Bush campaign consultant and vote-by-mail skeptic. "And from Saturday through Tuesday, we have mildly organized chaos."
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York plans to introduce a bill directing the Federal Election Commission to evaluate various vote systems and propose guidelines for adopting the most effective ones. Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is calling for a commission to do the same. A similar bill in the House is sponsored by Republican Jim Leach of Iowa and Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio, who almost lost his seat in 1988 because of a poorly designed ballot. Because congressional candidates appeared on the same line as presidential candidates, 79,000 people neglected to cast a vote for Congress.
Americans can take some comfort from the knowledge that most other advanced nations have voting methods at least as shopworn as ours. All of Japan uses paper ballots on which voters write in candidates' names themselves. On the other hand, sometimes the old methods have their points. The ancient Greeks, who invented the tumult of democracy, voted by tossing stones into a bowl: white for yes, black for no - hence "blackballed." There is no recorded problem of "hanging chads," though chipping might have been an issue. Best of all, it was cost effective. Rocks can be reused every year.
- Reported by Melissa August and Anne Moffett/Washington, Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville, Todd Murphy/Portland, David Schwartz/Phoenix and Ken Shiffman/Concord