Touching concern

More questions about touchscreen voting. According to the Miami Herald for August 5, it now emerges that more than 18 months ago, Florida officials, the same ones who loudly proclaim their faith in the machines and accuse opponents of being partisan fearmongers, were made aware of a suspicious difference in reported "undervotes" between districts using touchscreen systems and those using optical scanners. In the latter system, voters mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner.

An "undervote" is when a voter does not cast a ballot for a particular office.

Touchscreen voting machines are supposed to warn voters about undervotes to give them a chance to rectify the error if it is one. (The voter may have decided not to cast a ballot for that office or on that question.) Optical scanners to that only if there is more than one office or question on the ballot. That would appear to give reason to believe that undervotes should be rarer with touchscreen equipment than with scanners. Despite that,

[i]n January 2003, state election officials reported that there was a higher rate of so-called undervotes among voters using the ATM-style equipment than those voters who mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner.

At the time, the Florida Division of Elections compiled a detailed report that looked at how each county's voting equipment performed during the 2002 general election....

The undervote rate for the 52 counties that used optical scanners was 0.33 percent of all votes cast, compared to 0.92 percent for the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines.

That is, although the undervote rate for touchscreen machines should be lower than for scanners, it was nearly three times higher. And the pattern of computers reporting more undervotes than scanners apparently continued in the March 2004 presidential primary.

State officials dismiss the reports, noting that undervotes were at an all-time low and saying the computer account of them was less than 1%. But in the 2002 general election, a little over 5 million votes were cast for governor. One percent of that is 50,000 votes - or nearly 100 times the official margin of Bush over Gore in 2000.

Footnote: The Herald quotes Indian River Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem as downplaying the report.

She pointed out that the 2002 election was the first time that many voters first saw the machines. She predicted that as voters become more comfortable with touch-screen voting, the amount of undervotes will decline.

"It was the first time that many of these people have used this equipment," Clem said. "I think we will see a dramatic improvement in undervotes as we go through more elections."

Great. In 2000, problems in black precincts were attributed to the unfamiliarity with voting of many first-time registrants. In other words, we were told they were too dumb to figure it out. Not wanting to be discriminatory, apparently, Florida officials want to expand that judgment to all voters.