Voting Technology and Uncounted Votes in the United States

We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e. “residual votes”), followed by optically scanned ballots, mechanical lever machines, direct register electronic machines (DREs), and punch cards. In gubernatorial and senatorial races, paper, optical scan ballots, and DREs are significantly better in minimizing the residual vote rate than mechanical lever machines and punch cards. If all jurisdictions in the U.S. that used punch cards in 2000 had used optically scanned ballots instead, we estimate that approximately 500,000 more votes would have been attributed to presidential candidates nationwide. Voting Technology and Uncounted Votes in the United States For more than a century every feature of American elections has been subject to academic and popular scrutiny. In the year 2000, however, the election of the president United States came down to an aspect of the election system that had received scant attention from political scientists over the preceding century—the functioning of voting equipment. The most dramatic manifestation occurred in Palm Beach County, Florida, where two major problems cast doubt over the integrity of the election. Poor ballot design confused a significant number of voters about how to cast a vote. And, poor vote tabulator design made it difficult to determine intentions of voters. The “chads” from some punch cards had partially dislodged, making it impossible for the vote tabulator to count the ballots. Legal and political problems of determining voter intent permeated the recount process throughout Florida. The method used to cast and count ballots is surely the most mundane aspect of elections, but the possibility that equipment differs systematically immediately raises questions about the integrity of the electoral process in the United States. How bad are the methods for casting and counting votes in the United States? Equally troubling are questions of political equality and fairness. Are some technologies better at producing a more complete count of the vote? Does the lack of uniform voting equipment in the country mean that some voters are more likely to have their ballots counted than others? Concern over voting equipment in the wake of the 2000 election has given rise to a host of political and official studies into the effectiveness of the voting process. Critical to all these 1 Several federal commissions issued substantial reports on the election process, most notably National Commission on Election Reform (2001). At the state level see Florida Governor’s Select Task Force on Election Procedures, Standards, and Technology (2001), Georgia Secretary of State (2001), Iowa Secretary of State (2001), Maryland