Punch Cards Have Got to Go

The presidential race still turns on just a few hundred votes in Florida. That narrow margin adds enormous significance to the exceptionally large number of ballots--more than 180,000--that were thrown out statewide by county election officials because voters chose more than one presidential candidate or none at all, or because the votes they did cast failed to register. This is a problem that not only could have been foreseen but was, in a 1988 report by the National Bureau of Standards.

An Associated Press survey of Florida’s 67 counties found that nearly 3% of the 6,138,567 ballots cast for presidential candidates were disqualified, a considerable increase over the last two presidential elections. The percentage of rejected ballots varied markedly from county to county. The reason is obvious. Where voters had to punch a hole in a card, a large number of ballots were disqualified. Where there was an optical scan system, in which voters fill in a space with a pen, the number of invalidated ballots was small.

The now notorious “butterfly” ballot used in Palm Beach County contributed to nearly 30,000 ballots out of 463,000 cast going uncounted--an eyebrow-raising 6.4%. In Jacksonville and surrounding Duval County, nearly 9% of the votes didn’t count. Contrast that with Leon County, where only 181 votes--0.2% of the total--were disqualified. Leon, like 14 other Florida counties, uses an optical scan system.

The 12-year-old National Bureau of Standards report, unearthed this week by the Miami Herald, called attention to the problem of “hanging chads” in punch-card ballots and noted that machine recounts of punch cards are prone to give different results each time because the partially punched holes may be read differently each time. The report recommended abandoning the punch cards.

No election, whatever voting method is used, is error-free. But in no other presidential election has confusion over a ballot’s makeup or failure to fully punch a hole through a card had such consequences. California won’t know until Dec. 5, the deadline for final figures to be reported, how many ballots were disqualified in this state, but it’s a good bet that where punch cards were used the percentage will be high.

There are less mistake-prone methods for voting. Touch-screen technology, used in Riverside County among other places, is one. Optical scans are another. There has in the past been little incentive for state and county officials to spend the money to upgrade voting systems. Perhaps Florida’s embarrassment will be the stick that starts the process; the new Congress ought to provide the carrot, in the form of block grants to defray part of the cost.