NYT : Voters Find Some Machines Harder to Use

Voters Find Some Machines Harder to Use

by SEWELL CHAN | August 28, 2006

With New York State facing a looming deadline to modernize its election technology, a new report offers evidence that one of the two major types of voting machines being considered has a higher rate of unrecorded votes, suggesting that it is too confusing for many people.

The report, which the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law intends to release today, examined election records from thousands of counties across the nation since 2000. It is likely to animate long-simmering debates across the state’s 62 counties, which face a December deadline for deciding how to replace antiquated voting equipment.

For an overwhelming majority of the state’s 11.6 million registered voters, the changes will mean the end of the creaky lever machines that have been used for decades.

One of the two types of machines under consideration is the direct-recording electronic or D.R.E. systems, in which voters push a button or touch a screen to choose a candidate, and the ballot is automatically recorded and counted.

The other is the optical-scan system, in which voters mark an oval or arrow next to a candidate’s name on a paper ballot, which is then scanned into a machine at the precinct, allowing the voter to find and fix any errors.

The choice, however, is further complicated because the State Board of Elections has ruled that state law requires the use of a “full face” ballot — a ballot that displays all candidates for all races on a single page or screen.

The Brennan Center disagrees with the state board’s interpretation that a full-face ballot is required in New York.

In January, the Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, concluded that contrary to a widely held belief there, Connecticut law did not require full-face ballots.

The direct-recording electronic system is not inherently flawed, the report found, but when it is combined with full-face ballots, there seems to be more difficulty, particularly in areas with more black, Hispanic and low-income voters.

Such voters, according to the report, would find it easier to use digital machines that allow voters to make one choice and then flip to the next page, which is similar to what customers do at A.T.M.’s and airport check-in kiosks that dispense boarding passes. But the full-face requirement precludes the use of such machines.

In the absence of that option, optical-scan machines would be the best choice for counties, said Lawrence D. Norden, an associate counsel at the Brennan Center and an author of the report.

To adopt electronic machines with the full-face requirement, he said yesterday, “virtually guarantees that thousands of votes are going to be lost at every election.”

At stake in the decision between the two major types of machines is some $200 million in federal financing that the state will spend on new machines and other steps to modernize voting. To promote their products, a handful of manufacturers have hired lobbyists and aggressively courted county election commissioners.

John A. Ravitz, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, said yesterday that he had read a draft of the Brennan Center’s report and that its findings would be carefully reviewed by the board’s 10 members.

“We’re continuing to gather as much information as possible on both types of systems, both optical scan and D.R.E.,” said Mr. Ravitz, a former assemblyman.

Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, an organization that has been pressing for adoption of the optical-scan machines, said he hoped the report would have a major effect on the decision-making by counties.

“The implications of this report clearly show that the only viable voting system for New York State is precinct-based optical scans,” said Mr. Lipari, who represents the League of Women Voters of New York State on a committee that advises the state elections board on voting modernization.

However, support for the optical-scan ballots is by no means assured. Although optical-scan advocates say their systems are more cost-effective, proponents of direct-recording electronic system say the electronic machines do not waste paper and are easier for disabled people to use.

In March, the Justice Department sued New York State for failing to overhaul its election system as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was intended to prevent a recurrence of the Florida election debacle of 2000 and to help disabled people to vote. Unable to agree on a unified response to the federal law, Albany passed the decision along to localities.

For the Sept. 12 primary and the Nov. 7 election, the state and federal governments have agreed on a stopgap plan involving temporary machines for use by the disabled. But the counties still must choose machines to adopt over the long term. The state has yet to identify which machines will be acceptable. Eleven devices, made by a total of six manufacturers, are under consideration.

Besides New York, only one other state — Delaware — uses full-face ballots statewide, although some counties in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee also use them, according to David C. Kimball, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a co-author of the Brennan Center report.

For the report, Dr. Kimball reviewed election records for thousands of counties in 2000, 2002 and 2004. He compared the residual-vote rate — the difference between the number of ballots cast and the number of valid votes cast in a particular contest — across several voting systems. Residual votes occur because of “undervoting,” when voters intentionally or unintentionally make no selection, or by “overvoting,” when voters select too many candidates, invalidating the ballot for a particular contest.

Dr. Kimball found that elections involving both a touch-screen or push-button system and a full-face ballot generated a residual vote rate of 1.2 percent, compared with 0.7 percent for optical-scan ballots that are counted at the precinct.

For the study, he examined records for the 2004 presidential election from 2,402 counties. He found that the disparity between the two systems, in the percentage of unrecorded votes, was even higher in counties where the median income was less than $25,000 (2.8 percent versus 1.4 percent), where blacks made up more than 30 percent of the population (1.3 percent versus 0.9 percent) and where Hispanics made up more than 30 percent of the population (2.0 percent versus 1.2 percent).

(The report also examined two variants of the main new voting systems that are not applicable in New York State. These are optical-scan ballots that are counted centrally and do not allow voters to check their ballot for errors, and “scrolling” direct-recording electronic systems, which do not meet the “full face” requirement.)

“Any design feature that makes it more confusing or places more of a burden on the user increases the likelihood of errors, and that effect is more dramatic in low-income and minority communities,” Dr. Kimball said.

Mr. Norden added: “The digital divide is real. Full-face touch screen will put low-income and minority voters at a particular disadvantage.”

The report’s other two authors were Jeremy M. Creelan of the law firm Jenner & Block and Whitney Quesenberry, a designer who helps companies makes their Web sites easier to use.