Switched-on US voters hark back to punch cards

IT WAS an affair with technology that began in the early part of the last century and lasted several blissful decades before ending in an ugly divorce.

Now Americans have simply fallen out of love with their not-so-trusty old mechanical voting machines, which were widely blamed for the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida. But as voters in the United States rush to embrace the wonders of touch-screen voting and other electronic improvements on the notorious butterfly ballots and hanging chads of four years ago, many believe the old system was not so bad.

"If this is how it is starting, then we can look forward to a train wreck in Florida in November," said voting rights advocate David Allen, founder of the blackboxvoting.com website, after numerous malfunctions and glitches were reported with the new equipment on the first day of early voting for this year’s presidential contest.

Much of the problem, he believes, is that election officials attempted to deal with the backlash of the 2000 fiasco by rushing in electronic technology that had not been properly tested.

With less than two weeks until polling day, there are still outstanding lawsuits over the new equipment’s reliability, in particular its lack of a "paper trail" that would be required for any manual recount.

Worse still, he says, is that the new system is likely to be less accurate than the manual punch-card machines they have replaced in at least a third of the nation’s polling booths.

"When used as directed, mechanical voting machines are actually fairly accurate," he said. "Sure, they need to be sharpened once in a while and the box of punched-out chads emptied at least once a century, but if used properly they did the job."

Mechanical voting enjoyed its heyday in the elections of the 1940s and 1950s, when lever machines that punched a hole to mark the voter’s choice were seen as a more efficient and less time-consuming alternative to marking an X on a ballot paper.

"The US has always had the idea that hi-tech is better, and a long history of trying to do its elections on the cheap," Mr Allen said.

With each state responsible for running its own election as it saw fit, mechanical voting took many forms. Some states introduced punch-cards that could be read by early computers. Others, such as Florida, developed the butterfly ballot in which the voter’s choice had to be pushed through from a central row of options. Later still, optical scanning technology became available.

Yet some states never replaced the lever voting machines and will use them again next month, probably for the last time before the Help America Vote Act, introduced following the Florida debacle, requires all states to have eliminated punch-card and mechanical voting by 1 January, 2006.

Ironically, some of the same criticisms that face the new electronic devices were also levelled at the earlier mechanical models.

They recorded a trail of every vote cast onto a paper tape, but the voter could not see this to confirm his vote had been recorded correctly.

Similarly, much of the new technology can produce a printable audit of every vote, but this is available only to election officials.

There are also concerns that electronic machines are open to manipulation and security issues. "The industry will say there has never been a documented case of manipulation, but that’s like saying there’s no evidence of the perfect murder," Mr Allen said. "You do have all these errors."

Why does it have to be this way? In Britain, Australia and Canada...all you do is get a piece of paper. You mark it with an X. You put it into the ballot box. That's it; no problems reported in the recent Aussie election.

Regards, Ivan

Paper is a good thing! Actually, there was nothing wrong with the punch cards except those punching the cards :) In my area we use scan-tron type, they work just fine also. Nice thick piece of paper on which you fill in the blank middle of the arrow pointing to the candidate/s you want.

Why does it have to be this way?

Because if it were as simple as you suggest, it would be far more difficult for the Leftists in the DNC to steal elections through fraud and ballot manipulation.

Note that all these electronic voting machines were swept in on the tidal wave of Demoncrat "outrage" over President Bush's win in Florida 2000. First they created a phony scandal that Bush "stole" the election, using their own voter's stupidity as the evidence. Next the Demoncrats demanded that the old voting machines and methods be thrown out to prevent the "disenfranchisement" of a tiny minority of (their) voters. Now we have these electronic machines with no paper trail that can be completely corrupted with no evidence.

Of course, the icing on the cake is that the Propaganda Wing of the Demoncrat Party (the "mainstream" media) have already primed the public by claiming that the "evil Republicans" are behind these new electronic machines. That way the Demoncrats can have their cake and eat it too. If they succeed at manipulating the election results so that their candidate wins, no one will suspect that "Republican voting machines" would throw the election to the Demoncrats. And in any contested race where a Republican wins, they can immediately cry foul and claim that the Republicans committed fraud.

The sad thing is that punch cards are probably now completely understood. We know how to maintain the punch stations abd to be sure that they are cleaned out after each election, keeping the channels that received the punched out piece of chad clear. That said, optically scanned paper ballots are the way to go.

We use the scan-tron type too - it seems to work just fine. I'm worried about all the electronic stuff with no paper trail - leaves too much room for tampering, as SpyGuy said.

What scares me the most is that the dems are already on the defensive ready to blame us if their schemes (to elect Kerry by any means necessary) don't work. I was appalled to hear that they are already geared up to sue at the drop of a hat if Bush wins... :-(

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