Reply #37: Nation gets better at vote counts [View All]

Nation gets better at vote counts
By THOMAS HARGROVE Scripps Howard News Service
December 26, 2004


The nation's $2.2 billion investment in new voting machines and other election reforms reduced the number of ballots that failed to count in last month's presidential election, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study based on final or nearly complete election data provided by 43 states and the District of Columbia.

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Full election data is not yet available from South Carolina, but in North Carolina this year 58,223 ballots failed to register a presidential vote.

A few other states with historically high rates of undervoting showed little or no improvement this year, including the key battleground state of Ohio. Some 96,580 ballots in the Buckeye State failed to register a presidential vote this year, up from 93,991 four years ago.

Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, noting that 68 of Ohio's 88 counties still used punch-card ballots last month, said the results underscore the need for updated voting equipment. But Blackwell also suggested his state's 1.7 percent undervote - more than four times higher than Florida's this year - could be caused by the voters themselves.

"Given human nature, when you're talking about 5.8 million people casting a vote, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to think that you have a small percentage of people who would say, 'A pox on both of your houses,'" Blackwell said.

The Scripps Howard study found that there were at least 1,126,562 ballots that failed to register a presidential vote last month, based on complete information from 40 states and partial data from three others. This is a dramatic improvement from the 1,605,263 ballots that didn't register presidential votes in 38 states that reported complete data (including number of ballots cast) in 2000.

Link:
http://www.courierpress.com/ecp/news/article/0,1626,ECP_734_3425406,00.html

Note - these are the same people that published "Election study finds widespread ballot-counting problems"
http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=MISCOUNT-ELECT-12-20-04