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November 19, 2000
New Focus on Flaws in Punch-Card System
By FORD FESSENDEN
t a time when the corner store has a touch-screen machine capable of dispensing $20 bills while deducting them from your bank account, how can millions of American votes still be cast using relics from the time of Sputnik, and be counted by equipment that is almost guaranteed to get the numbers wrong?
The simple answer is money.
A combination of events — a razor- thin election with huge stakes in a state where counties count ballots with four technologies, each with its own margin of error — has put punch-card voting systems at the heart of historic uncertainty over the presidential election.
Yet the controversy presents no new issues about a technology that has always had serious shortcomings.
As a technological revolution, the punch-card voting system was a putsch, rapidly supplanting rival technologies in the late 1960's, shortly after it was introduced. And state and local governments have continued to use punch-card systems even though alternatives have surpassed them in ease of use and accuracy.
Punch-card voting systems are cheap. They are fast. And, before the words "dimpled chad" became a part of the national lexicon, elections officials thought they were accurate enough.
A lever-operated machine, the technology most commonly used in the early 1960's and still used by counties in New York State and elsewhere, cost $5,000 then and weighed nearly half a ton. By contrast, the first punch-card system, used in 1964, cost about $800 and weighed only about 20 pounds, saving money for transportation and storage.
And the card readers that came with the voting machines could count thousands of votes in mere minutes, saving untold amounts in poll-worker overtime over the hand-counted paper ballots.
"If you looked at market penetration of the punch card, it first came into states where they paid poll workers by the hour," said Todd Urosevich, vice president for customer service at Election Systems and Software, which markets voting systems using punch cards, optical readers and computer touch screens. "By the early 70's, it was being used by half of the voting jurisdictions."
Rebecca Mercuri, the president of the consulting firm Notable Software and an authority on electronic voting tabulation, said: "There's such pressure to get the returns quickly. You can run the punch cards through at a high rate of speed, print out the computerized report, assume it to be correct, and get the results broadcast on the 11 o'clock news."
For that speed, the machines sacrificed accuracy. "With any marginal card, the card reader says, `I'm going to throw that out,' " Ms. Mercuri said. It does not mean that a voter did not vote a certain way, just that the machine cannot be sure, whether because of chad — as the paper punch squares are known — or some other technical issue. "It's a false negative and it needs to be relooked at manually," she said.
The fact that every run through a punch-card machine results in a different count, as incompletely detached chads fall out, is troubling, but it has seldom affected the outcome of an election. Election administrators were relieved that while counts were always wrong, they were wrong in a consistent way.
"It's almost a certainty that every recount you do that both candidates will pick up votes," said Tony Sirvello, elections administrator for Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston. "I've done 150 or 200, and I've never had a recount turn the results around."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company