What’s Wrong With the Election System?

1. What’s Wrong With the Election System? David Kimball University of Missouri-St. Louis December 5, 2002

2. Outline • Impetus for an examination of voting methods in the United States • Research findings • Recommendations for election reforms and issues for future elections

3. Sunshine State in 2000

4. 2000 Presidential Election:“A Perfect Storm” • Florida Official Results • George W. Bush – 2,912,790 votes • Al Gore – 2,912,253 votes • Bush wins Florida by 537 votes. • Approximately 180,000 ballots in Florida failed to record a vote for president (roughly 3% of ballots cast). • Nationally, about 2 million unrecorded votes in the presidential election of 2000.

5. How Can You Fail to Cast a Vote? • Overvote: Selecting too many candidates • Undervote: Not selecting any candidates

6. NORC/Media Consortium Review of Florida Ballots • Most unrecorded votes in Florida were overvotes (68%). • Half of the undervotes in Florida were failed attempts to vote for a single candidate. • Half of the undervotes Florida were “genuine” (blank). • Almost 25,000 of the unrecorded votes in Florida could have been counted.

7. Overvote in Florida

8. Overvote in Florida

9. Undervote in Florida

10. Undervote in Florida

11. Undervote in Florida

12. Undervote in Florida

13. What’s Happened Since Florida? • Each state and county has asked “Could Florida happen here?” • Federal legislation – the Help America Vote Act of 2002 • State legislation – Missouri included • Research to examine the correlates of unrecorded votes and find out what works and what does not.

14. Research on Unrecorded Votes • Examined election returns from counties in 2000 • Examined precinct returns in Florida and Illinois • Primarily a cross-sectional analysis • Other studies, including multiple elections (Caltech/MIT Voting Project, groups at Maryland, Berkeley, Harvard)

15. Factors Examined • Voting technology • Ballot features and design • Election features • Demographics • Socio-economic disparity in unrecorded votes.

16. Local Control of Elections • Election administration is primarily a matter of local (county) control. • This creates a lot of variation in voting methods across the country. • Great for researchers • Headaches for election reformers • Voting technology is a prime example

17. Votomatic Punch Card

18. Paper Ballot

19. Lever Voting Machine

20. Electronic Voting Machine (DRE)

21. Electronic Voting Machine (DRE)

22. Optical Scan Ballot

24. Voting Technology Results • Votomatic punch card ballots clearly produce the highest rate of unrecorded votes in contests at the top of the ballot. • Newer voting technology that allows voters to discover and correct mistakes reduce the number of unrecorded votes, especially in low-income or minority precincts. • DRE • Precinct-count optical scan

26. Ballot Design • Ballot design has been largely overlooked as a cause of unrecorded votes. • Several ballot features are important • Number of columns • Straight-party option • “None of the above” option

27. “Butterfly” Ballot

29. Straight-Party Punch

30. Percentage of Unrecorded Votes in the 2000 Presidential Election (Counties)

31. Nevada Ballot

32. Ballot Layout

33. Ballot Instructions

34. Voter Education

35. Recommendations • If cost and staffing is no object, replace punch card voting systems and adopt ballot features that reduce the number of unrecorded votes. • Switching to new voting technology is costly. Making ballot design improvements is relatively inexpensive. • Consider uniform voting systems at the state level? • A potential concern is the growing use of absentee and mail-in voting.