This will be an unpopular post with my Democratic brethren. It is about who is to blame for frustrating the voters' intent in the House race in Florida's 13th Congressional district (Katherine Harris's old seat). While it seems absolutely clear most voters wanted the Democrat Jennings, that votes did not register for her is mostly the fault of Democratic Party officials and the Jennings campaign imo. Today Paul Krugman writes:
Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software. About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race.
Update [2006-11-24 11:18:59 by Big Tent Democrat]: Ballot design likely culprit:
The same electronic ballot design flaw implicated in more than 18,300 Sarasota nonvotes might have caused problems for South Florida voters in two well-publicized Cabinet races.
Both Broward and Miami-Dade counties recorded more than 34,000 nonvotes in their elections for attorney general and chief financial officer, according to election results from each county's Supervisor of Elections office.
The problem was worse in precincts with many older voters.
In both counties, the two Cabinet races appeared at the bottom of a voting screen with the higher-profile race for governor and lieutenant governor -- a contest in which seven sets of candidates nearly filled the screen. All races on the page were listed under a general heading.
One explanation is that many voters assumed the governor's race was the only one on the page, touched the ''next'' button and moved on through the ballot without noticing the two races.
In Sarasota, where the 13th Congressional District race also occupied the same page as the governor's race, experts have blamed the design problem for 18,382 nonvotes in one of the nation's most contested congressional races.
Voting machine malfunctions could have contributed to some of the nonvotes, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a member of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. Voters also may have decided to skip the race intentionally.
But the high number of nonvotes potentially related to the design -- throughout Florida -- signals a need to re-evaluate some of the state's electronic voting technology, Ansolabehere said.
''In general it's a good rule of thumb to have one office per screen,'' said Ansolabehere, who is also a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ``It really minimizes confusion as to what you're doing.''
The canvassing board certified election results Friday in Broward and Miami-Dade, and acknowledged the significant number of nonvotes in the two races.
''I think looking at that page you may not see those two races,'' Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said.
Sarasota, Broward and Miami-Dade counties all use the same touch-screen iVotronic machines, which are produced by Election Systems & Software.
Each county designs its own ballots.
REDESIGN READY
Even before the Nov. 7 election, Miami-Dade already had plans to change its ballots to make the races easier to see, said Lester Sola, Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections. The new electronic ballots will be introduced with Tuesday's runoff elections.
''You're going to have more pages, but you'll have fewer races to a page,'' Sola said.
Sola said Miami-Dade made the change to increase voter participation in all of the county's races.
A campaign worker for attorney general candidate Walter ''Skip'' Campbell said at least 30 people had reported concerns with the ballot.
''It's pretty clear that something went wrong here,'' said Jeff Garcia, who worked as campaign manager for Campbell, who lost the attorney general race. ``If you look at the screen, it's very easy to skip over races.''
Erwin and Phyllis Deiser said they cast their ballots during early voting for the attorney general race on two separate machines at a Pembroke Pines poll -- but, they said, the vote wasn't initially recorded.
When the review screen came up at the end, no vote appeared for the attorney general race, they said. However, when they each went back and marked the ballot again, the votes registered.
''It happened to both of us,'' said Erwin Deiser, 70, a full-time minister who lives in Century Village.
Representatives for CFO candidates Alex Sink and Tom Lee said neither campaign received any calls from voters who had trouble finding the race on the ballot.
''Maybe people felt like they didn't need to call us,'' Tara Klimek, Sink's spokeswoman, said.
In both Broward and Miami-Dade, about 9 percent of voters did not cast ballots in the races for attorney general or for CFO.
STATISTICAL DISPARITY
Fewer than one percent of voters in Broward and fewer than 2 percent of voters in Miami-Dade did not vote in the governor's race. That means the percentage of Cabinet race nonvotes should have been closer to 3 or 4 percent, experts calculate.
''Ten percent? That's awful,'' Ted Selker, MIT director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, said.
In some precincts, more than 20 percent of voters failed to cast a ballot in one or both Cabinet races. Those precincts were more likely to have many older voters.
Specific age breakdowns weren't available for Broward precincts, but many of the precincts with the highest percentage of undervotes were in retirement communities in Pembroke Pines, Hallandale Beach and Tamarac.
In the Miami-Dade precincts with a high percentage of nonvotes, almost half of the registered voters were 65 and older.
Unlike in Sarasota, where fewer than 400 votes separated Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan, the South Florida nonvotes likely would not have changed the outcome in either Cabinet race.
But election officials can't always assume the votes won't make a difference in the outcome, Selker said.
''We don't know beforehand if we're going to have a close race or not,'' he said. ``There's always a danger.''
VOTER CONFIDENCE
A high number of nonvotes also may heighten voters' doubts about the accuracy of election procedures, Ansolabehere said.
''It has raised a lot of suspicion and a lot of concern,'' he said. ``And i think it puts a lot of pressure on election officials.''
I must say, as a fan of Paul Krugman, I find this passage to be incredibly well - NOT good. Fully a third interviewed said they could not find the race on the screen. not surprising when one considers the ballot design in the FL-13 race on the ESS machines. The Fl-13 race ballot is clearly flawed in design. The Sentinel reporting shows a third of those reporting problems as having not seen the race. This is not strong thinking by Paul Krugman.
You see ballot designs costing Democrats elections in Florida is NOT a new thing. You may remember this one:
USA TODAY found that up to 18% of the 171,908 disputed ballots could be counted as clear legal votes in a manual recount because the voter's intent could be determined. The rest were irretrievable because the intent could not be determined or the ballot marks violated Florida law. That means at least 141,000 voters, a number about the size of the voting-age population of Orlando, lost their voice in selecting the president.
The study reveals that Democratic voters made far more mistakes, especially when it came to overvotes, than Republican voters. Gore was marked on 84,197 of the 111,261 overvote ballots, compared with 37,731 for Bush.
Ballot standards
. . . USA TODAY's examination highlights an ugly reality of elections that had been largely unknown to the public before November. The American system of elections routinely fails to count hundreds of thousands of ballots because of errors by voters, confusing ballot instructions, poorly designed ballots, flawed voting and counting machines and the failure of election workers to adequately help voters.
. . . Overvote mistakes
The overvotes — ballots with too many candidates marked — tell a fascinating story of how voters err, how election officials unwittingly allow those mistakes and how the consequences were fatal for Gore's presidential hopes.
Only 3% of the 111,261 overvote ballots had markings that could convert a ballot into a legal vote. But the other 97% of the overvote ballots revealed much about the voter intentions, too.
Anthony Salvanto, a political scientist at University at California at Irvine, specializes in computer analysis of voting patterns and served as an upaid consultant to USA TODAY and its newspaper partners on the project.
Salvanto examined the voting patterns on 56,225 overvote ballots for which he had complete data on all races. He also analyzed ballot design in other counties to statisitcally measure voter intent.
Salvanto estimated that Gore would have gained at least 15,000 votes if Gore supporters had not made overvote errors. To make this estimate, he counted only ballots that included votes for Bush and Gore (but not each other) and where the voter voted for that candidate's party in the races for U.S. Senate, state Treasurer and Education Commissioner.
In a less restrictive statistical measure of voter intent, Gore would have gained 25,000 votes if a Democratic vote in the Senate race is an accurate indication of voter intent.
"You get a pretty clear pattern from these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Gore," says Salvanto, who helped USA TODAY build the overvote database and analyze it.
The computer data show that voters who marked Bush or Gore on overvote ballots tended to vote for the same party's candidates in other races, an indication of their intent in the presidential race:
* 83% of overvoters who marked a combination of candidates that included Gore, but not Bush, voted Democratic in the U.S. Senate race.
* 69% of overvoters whose vote combination for president included Bush, but not Gore, voted Republican in the Senate race.
* 45% of voters who marked both Bush and Gore voted Republican in the Senate race, and 42% voted Democratic — a nearly even split.
Salvanto says people who overvoted had few problems elsewhere on the ballot. Only 6% of those who overvoted in the presidential race made the same mistake on the Senate race, which was next on the ballot.
It was the presidential race, with its 10 presidential candidates and 10 vice presidential candidates, that confused people. Voters were confused by the long list of minority party presidential candidates on the ballot — the result of the state's recent easing of requirements to get on the ballot.
Salvanto says the leading causes of overvotes in Florida were ballot design, ballot wording and efforts by voters to choose a vice president as well as a president.
Salvanto's findings on why BALLOT DESIGN cost Gore the election:
- Duval County's two-page ballot. Voters were shown the first five presidential candidates on one page and another five candidates on a second page. After the first page was an instruction that read "turn page to continue voting." In addition, a sample ballot distributed by election officials contained the instruction, "vote every page." And that's what many people did.
Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had 21,188 overvotes, one-fifth of the state total. Fifty-five percent of the overvotes were for just two candidates, one from the first ballot page and one from the second. That suggests that more than half the errors could have been due to the misleading instructions.
Gore had 7,162 of these two-candidate/two-page overvotes vs. 4,555 for Bush — in other words, probably costing Gore about 2,600 votes.
"This Duval County ballot alone likely cost Gore the election," Salvanto says.
- Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot. To help elderly voters, Democratic election officials put candidates' names in large type. That forced the names of presidential candidates to appear on two facing pages. Voters were instructed to punch beside their candidate's name in a narrow strip between the two pages. That confused voters because Gore was the second candidate listed but the third hole to punch. Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, on the opposite page, was assigned the second hole.This confusion alone cost Gore the presidency, Salvanto says. Gore was punched on 80% of the 18,748 overvote ballots vs. 20% for Bush.
The most common overvote combination: 5,237 votes for Gore and Buchanan, who was listed just above Gore on the opposite page. Nearly 75% of Gore-Buchanan ballots had a Democratic vote in the Senate race.
- Trying to vote for vice president. This may be the most common cause of overvotes, Salvanto says.
Florida law required that each presidential ballot instruct voters to "Vote for Group," an ambiguous phrase intended to tell voters that when they vote for a presidential candidate they also are selecting that party's vice presidential candidate. But many voters interpreted this as an instruction to punch the ballot two times, frequently for their candidate and the one listed just below on the ballot. Excluding the Gore-Buchanan combination in Palm Beach, the most common overvote was for Gore and Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne, who appeared immediately below Gore on the ballot.
. . . "It seems reasonable that these voters were Democratic and intended to vote for Gore," Salvanto says.
So here we are after all that, after all the Diebold/BlackBox BS, and Democrats in Florida, officials in the Jennings campaign, let that flawed ballot go? That is criminally inexcusable political work.
What I see is not an ounce of evidence of computer problems. What I see is ballot design problems that are overwhelmingly clear - and that could and should have been prevented by Democrats and the Jennings campaign BEFORE the election.
I think Krugman's piece is not very responsible as I read it and I think it simply missttates what the Sentinel reporting is showing.
By all means let the contest of the election explore what happened here. Let it be a battle cry for paper ballots and paper trails. Let ESS fight for it now. Because I think they are being scapegoated. I assume they'll want to avoid that in the future.
Some Democratic incompetence is being given a free pass here. I hope it is revealed in the contest of this election and some people get the ax for this inexcusable neglect.