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Election Day Could Be A Doozy, Experts Say

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The New York Times

Published: July 21, 2008

With millions of new voters heading to the polls this November and many states introducing new voting technologies, election officials and voting monitors say they fear the combination is likely to create long lines, stressed-out poll workers and late tallies on Election Day.

At least 11 states, including Florida, will use new voting equipment as the nation shifts away from touch-screen machines and to the paper ballots of optical scanners, which will be used by more than 55 percent of voters. About half of all voters will use machines unlike the ones they used in the last presidential election, experts say, and more than half of the states will use new statewide databases to verify voter registration.

With Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy expected to attract many new voters who may never have encountered a voting machine, voting experts and election officials say they are worried that the system may buckle under the increased strain.

"I'm concerned about the weak spots," said Rosemary E. Rodriguez, the chairwoman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which oversees voting. "So much depends on whether there will be enough poll workers, whether they are trained enough and whether their state and county election directors give them contingency plans and resources to handle the unexpected."

Past Troubles

Some areas, including Baltimore, ran out of paper ballots in 2006 or in this year's primaries and plan to order many more this fall. Ohio plans to add paper backups in case its electronic machines break down again, as they did in 2004, creating long lines. New Jersey, New York and California, among other states, face shortages of poll workers or the money to pay for them.

And voting rights advocates are working with officials in Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania to try to prevent the kind of ballot design problems that added to the loss of about 12,000 votes in this year's presidential primary in Los Angeles County and about 18,000 votes in a 2006 congressional contest in Sarasota County.

"Election officials are unanimous in their commitment to ensuring every eligible American's right to vote, but in many places the system they oversee simply isn't designed to handle anywhere near the number of voters that may turn out," said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a project of the Pew Center on the States. "In previous elections, the question has been, 'Will the system work for each voter?' But this year the real question is whether the system can handle the load of all these voters."

Future Challenges

Poll worker training and ballot design will be more important than ever this year. The election commission has predicted that at least 2 million poll workers will be needed in November, double the number who worked in the 2004 presidential election.

But many states face budget problems that make it hard to recruit poll workers. New York City election officials have said they lack the money to pay the estimated 8,000 additional poll workers needed in November. Several states have resorted to recruiting high school students.

Many voters heading to the polls in November will receive paper ballots for the first time. The ballots are counted by optical scanners and provide a more reliable paper trail than touch-screen machines in case of a dispute or malfunction.

The main issue with the paper ballots will be their unfamiliarity to voters, not the technology itself. Ideally, in fact, paper ballots could reduce lines at polling places, because election officials would not have to set up a limited number of expensive touch-screen machines in each booth. Paper ballots require only a writing surface, and far fewer optical-scan machines are needed to count them.

But poll workers will have to explain the system to new voters and make certain to print and to distribute enough paper ballots for each polling place.

Even More Problems

In the past, shortages of paper ballots or electronic machines have been a common cause of long lines and people leaving the polling places without voting, said Adam Fogel, a program director at FairVote, a voting rights advocacy group.

The swing states that experienced the longest lines, including Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania, lack uniform rules for distributing machines and ballots, the report says. Most states allocate machines and ballots in August, two months before most of the major registration drives are completed, according to a report released in August by FairVote.

Although most of the 30 states with touch-screen machines still do not plan to provide backup paper ballots, others will do so for the first time in a presidential election.

Jonah H. Goldman of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the high turnout and surge of new voters were likely to cause bottlenecks as eligible voters arrive at the polls and find their names are missing from the databases that election officials are using to check registration.

In the primaries, reports from at least 12 states said eligible voters ran into that problem.

The new computerized databases, required by a 2002 federal law, were meant to provide uniformity in how states run elections. By coordinating with other state lists, officials can more easily remove from the rolls people who have died, changed residence or been convicted of felonies, to help reduce fraud. But the purges also occur with little oversight, and errors can be significant.

Goldman said his organization was closely watching Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, because those states have purged hundreds of thousands of voters since 2006.

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