Word: stated
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...