[The following is an excerpted article about how the 2000 presidential election spotlighted economic inequities of voting in America. Since the article's publication, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has released a study of particularly harsh disenfranchisement among Florida's black voters (see "Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election: Executive Summary"). Without diminishing the implications of USCCR's findings, this article argues that ill-equipped polling places represent a nationwide economic problem affecting many ethnic groups. —K.I.]
[Jesse Jackson is] right that a striking number of the votes not counted in Florida [in the 2000 presidential election] were cast by minorities. That's because punch-card machines, which have introduced "chads" into the American lexicon and which often produce ballots that can't be counted, are disproportionately used in poor, minority communities. The scandal of what happened in Florida on November 7 isn't that white election officials conspired to throw out black votes; it's that the deep inequities between the voting infrastructures in rich and poor areas made it so they didn't need to. Under our system, a dramatically disproportionate percentage of poor voters have their votes thrown out every year—not just in Florida but all over the country.
In America today, between 1 and 2 percent of ballots cast at the polls never get their presidential preference counted. Known as "drop-off," this discrepancy has several possible causes, principal among them "overvoting" (two or more votes cast for the same office) and "undervoting" (which can result from voter abstention or from a ballot tabulator reading an insufficiently marked ballot as blank).
The good news is that technology can make overvoting and undervoting much less likely. ATM-style touch-screen machines can be programmed to prevent voters from indicating more than one choice per office. Optical-scan voting systems, which tabulate ink or pencil marks on SAT-style, paper ballots, can be programmed to easily identify overvoted or undervoted ballots—and then spit them out, so voters may be able to correct their mistakes. These new machines can reduce the number of uncounted ballots to practically zero: In Florida's Leon County, which uses optical-scan tabulators, this year's presidential drop-off was a mere 0.1 percent.
The bad news is that the high-tech machines don't come cheap. Touch-screen machines can cost up to $5,000 each, and in poorer cities with large populations and small election budgets, they're often out of reach. Instead, populous areas—like Los Angeles, Illinois's Cook County, and Atlanta's Fulton County—generally rely on old-fashioned punch-card machines, which cost as little as $250 apiece. And, not surprisingly, much higher percentages of their votes go uncounted. In 1992, for instance, a study by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported a drop-off in Fulton County of more than 11,500 presidential votes, or 4.3 percent, largely concentrated in low-education, high-poverty, high-minority urban areas. And this year news reports put Cook County's combined undervote and overvote total at 122,000, while nearby McHenry County, an affluent, predominantly white area that uses optical-scan technology, threw out only twelve ballots due to overvoting. Says Kim Brace, president of the Washington, D.C.–based elections consulting firm Election Data Services, "It really is a case of economics."
In fact, about the only way the poor can enjoy the same certainty as the wealthy that their votes will be counted is if, by a quirk of geography, they're part of the same tax base. Consider Silicon Valley's San Mateo County, which includes such affluent havens as Woodside, Atherton, Hillsborough, and Portola Valley—as well as East Palo Alto, a poorer community infamous for its high murder rates. In 1992 San Mateo retired its old-style lever machines in favor of state-of-the-art optical-scan tabulators (it now has 525 of them, at $3,500 a pop), as well as touch-screen machines available for pre–Election Day voting ($2,200 each). Voters in East Palo Alto cast their votes on the same machines as voters in Woodside. This year, only 0.38 percent of the ballots cast in the poorer city contained overvotes for president.
Fortunately, the poor may not have to depend on the serendipities of geography forever. Even before the Florida disaster, many jurisdictions had begun funding upgrades for their voting systems. On September 29, Fulton County's election board issued a capital-improvements memo decrying its "outdated election equipment ... originally purchased in 1964" and proposing an allocation of up to $3 million for conversion to an optical-scan system. And Pennsylvania's Philadelphia County, which uses lever machines that Deputy City Commissioner Edward Schulgen calls "iron behemoths," is negotiating to purchase 3,500 touch-screen machines at a cost of more than $20 million. The California legislature is considering two separate proposals, one for $230 million and one for $300 million, to help counties defray the cost of upgrading from punch cards to optical-scan or touch-screen systems.
But, while a complete overhaul of voting equipment in poorer counties would represent a vast improvement, a onetime expenditure would ameliorate the problem only temporarily. In addition to being cheap to purchase, punch-card machines are cheap to maintain. By contrast, like any computer technology, touch-screen machines need regular software upgrades—which can require costly licensing agreements. For example, Global Election Systems charges fees of about 18 percent per year on touch-screen and optical-scan software prices of $50,000 to $250,000—depending, once again, on the size of the county and the number of machines involved. Many American cities, with small tax bases and competing claims on municipal funds, can't afford that. All of which brings up an obvious question, one the Florida crisis should surely be raising on Capitol Hill: If the federal government helps poor communities police their streets, teach their children, and house their residents, shouldn't Washington also help ensure that their citizens have an equal opportunity to vote?
