Seems like a marketing job for the Bush machines....
By THOMAS HARGROVE Scripps Howard News Service
December 26, 2004
America did a much better job of counting its votes this year.
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.
Nearly 99 percent of the 122 million ballots cast in the Nov. 2 general election successfully recorded a vote for president, a significant improvement over the 98 percent that counted in the race for the White House four years ago.
"It's a start, a very good start," said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission created by Congress to fix the kinds of election problems found in Florida four years ago. "Have all of our problems been solved? No. But there's much more to celebrate in this election than to mourn, no question about it."
But the study did find wide variations among states in the accuracy of vote counts. Some states were eight times more likely than others to have ballots that didn't tally a choice for president last month, often because of poor ballot design or errors in tabulation.
"We still have a lot of work to do," Soaries said.
http://www.courierpress.com/ecp/cda/article_print/0,1983,ECP_734_3425406_ARTICLE-DETAIL-PRINT,00.html