Sep. 20, 2004
Can Florida Happen Here? (Not Hurricanes!)
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - This year, if Florida bungles the presidential election, it at least can blame it on the hurricanes.
The Sunshine State has been crippled by one storm after another and North Carolina hasn’t been far behind, suffering damage from Alex, Bonnie, Charley, Frances, and Ivan.
Hurricanes, however, are no excuse for North Carolina election officials. When asked if a Florida election fiasco can happen here, Don Wright had a simple answer: “No.”
Wright, state Elections Board legal counsel, believes that North Carolina election officials have battened the hatches and readied the system for the Nov. 2 general election.
And just how does our system rate in regards to accuracy and reliability? “Very good,” says Wright. “We are examined as a model by other states.”
North Carolina counties use a variety of voting methods:
Paper ballots. Three counties, Graham, Hyde and Tyrrell, small in population and rural in economy, use paper ballots.
Punch cards. Six counties, Cabarrus, Duplin, Forsyth, Onslow, Vance, and Watauga, use punch card ballots made notorious in the Florida re-count of 2000.
Mechanical lever. Four counties, Chowan, Hoke, Scotland and Swain, pull levers on mechanical voting machines.
DRE (Direct Recording Electronic machines). Forty counties use DREs, AKA “touch-screen” machines.
Optical scans. Forty-seven counties including Wake, which typically casts more ballots than any other county, use optical scanners to tabulate votes.
While some election watchdogs want uniformity in our voting machinery, one can be sympathetic when small, poor counties choose less expensive ways to vote. The goal is to have accurate and reliable voting, and if a system does that, why “fix it?”
The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) allocated millions of dollars to states to upgrade their voting programs. North Carolina, following the recommendations of an advisory committee, spent money to expand its computer technology and to help poor counties improve access for disabled voters.
Says Wright, “It mandated additional requirements for registration. Identification will be required for some less than one percent of first time voters. It also has given us additional guidelines for provisional voting.”
Some organizations have been concerned about new voting machines, namely the touch-screen DREs. In the 2002 election, Georgia installed touch-screen voting machines in every precinct and the result was not encouraging. According to one report, “in greater Atlanta, 77 memory cards disappeared, delaying certification of the results for 10 days...machines froze up and waiting lines grew as technicians struggled to reboot.”
Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause of North Carolina, says the primary concern is the lack of a “paper trail” with such voting machines. There also have been several studies and tests that show some of these high-tech machines are susceptible to sabotage from computer hackers.
It was not sabotage but simple malfunctions, says Phillips, when six machines in Wake County were put to a trial test in 2002. “They stopped recording votes while the polls were still open,” he says. “The problem is that there was no paper trail and you don’t know where the votes went.” This is not good when you remember Florida officials claimed Bush won that state’s electoral votes by fewer than 600 votes.
The concern for some kind of back-up, paper documents for electronic machines has led Nevada, California, Washington and Illinois to adopt laws requiring paper records with their computerized system. Nevada spent $9.3 million on its 2,600 computers and printers that were employed in all 117 counties in its primary election September 7. The system, according to Dean Heller, the Nevada Secretary of State, worked “flawlessly.”
The Board of Election’s Wright has heard the complaints about DREs, and he notes that North Carolinians have been using such machines since 1988 without serious incidents. He knew about the Wake County foul-up and noted that election officials had recorded the names of those who had voted that day. About 370 used the broken machines, and they were contacted and asked to vote again.
Recounts in close, recent elections also indicate that the state’s various systems work. The recount, for example, in the 10th Congressional District runoff upheld original poll results.
Wright says more than 5.2 million people are registered to vote as of September 11. Over 3 million voted in the 2000 election, about 59 percent. Wright’s boss, Board Executive Director Gary Bartlett, believes there is unusually high interest in the presidential election this year. He expects a near-record turnout. His prediction: about 69 percent.
If not a hurricane of voters, that’s a storm of ballots.
Barlow Herget is a former Raleigh city councilman and writes the Follow the Money column for the N.C. Center for Voter Education.
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