Strain Evident in Election System

Though the nation’s election system avoided a meltdown in the presidential race, experts said Wednesday that it still needs to be closely examined for the way it handled the high voter turnout and myriad other strains and irregularities.

Federal officials, local agencies and independent watchdogs said a wide range of problems needed to be examined. They include the long lines that plagued many precincts, the role of sometimes-intrusive poll watchers, the integrity of new electronic voting machines, procedures involving provisional ballots, and the big registration drives that preceded the election.

Tens of thousands of problems were reported by voters to independent groups monitoring, though outside groups said none of the problems would likely have changed the outcome of the presidential election.

Gracia M. Hillman, vice chairwoman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said her federal agency wants to closely examine the strain put on the system by the massive voter turnout.

“Too many polling places were not prepared for the high voter turnout,” she said. “The other thing we will look at is how some outside groups registered voters.”

In some areas, including Ohio, voters waited for six hours or longer, which Hillman said is not acceptable.

“Most election officials don’t want people to stand in line for more than 15 minutes and they are horrified if they find people in line for several hours,” she said.

In addition, she said massive voter registration drives by outside groups should be reviewed. She noted that in some cases, the organizations were sitting on tens of thousands of signed registration forms for months before they were turned into local registrars.

The big turnout was just one of many pressures that strained the system. Tens of thousands of independent poll watchers showed up in precincts all over the country, sometimes disrupting the process, local officials said.

“We have no rules that govern poll watchers,” said Harvard Lomax, registrar of voters in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas. “One polling place had 14 poll watchers in there. In most cases, they acted professionally, but in a few cases law enforcement had to be called in.”

Nevada’s new touch-screen voting systems performed without major hitches, keeping lines short, Lomax said. But in many locations, the results weren’t quite so good, according to critics of the new technology.

“We saw systematic problems throughout the U.S.,” said Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org, a group that is calling for every electronic voting machine to produce a paper trail that can audited.

Doherty said the problems were not serious enough to affect President Bush’s victory, but the group is investigating whether some state and local results are suspect.

But electronic voting machines appear to be here to stay. Forty-five million people, or 39% of all voters, used machines that recorded votes electronically, compared to just 12% in 2000.

Black Box Voting, a watchdog group based in Seattle, said it believes serious problems may exist with the new technology and is investigating whether any vote totals were changed by the machines, said Bev Harris, executive director of the group.

It has filed 3,000 freedom of information requests and will file another 10,000 requests with local government agencies, seeking internal electronic logs from the machines, Harris said.

The intent is to compare different sets of records to see if there are anomalies that nobody has yet detected. Harris noted that exit polls of voters leaving precincts were different than the vote totals being reported by the machines.