New York Times
July 8, 2001
By David Stout

WASHINGTON, July 8 - A Congressional study has found that the votes of poor people and members of minorities were more than three times as likely to go uncounted in the 2000 presidential election than the votes of more affluent people.

The study was prompted in part by Vice President Al Gore's loss to Gov. George W. Bush in an election that ultimately came down to several hundred disputed ballots in Florida, whose 25 Electoral College votes went to Mr. Bush after the Supreme Court halted a recount there. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote but narrowly won the electoral vote.

The study, conducted for Democratic members of the House Government Reform Committee, focused on 40 Congressional districts in 20 states. It found that the type of voting equipment used was crucial, with voters using punch-card machines seven times as likely to have their ballots discarded as those using machines that employ a special writing instrument and warn a voter if the ballot is about to be spoiled.

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the panel, called the disparities "an outrage" and said that more often than not, precincts where poor people lived had older voting equipment. "People may think it was just a Florida problem," said Karen Lightfoot, a member of the committee's Democratic staff. "This study shows it definitely was not."

The study, distributed in advance to news organizations for release on Monday, says some analysts estimate that 1.9 percent of all ballots cast in the 2000 presidential race were not counted.

No doubt some were not counted because voters simply chose not to vote for a presidential candidate, or voted for two candidates, the study says. "More often, however," it adds, "the ballots were discarded because the voting machine failed to accurately record the intention of the voter."

The 1.9 percent national no-count rate is equivalent to almost two million votes, the study notes, and "in a close election, these discarded ballots could mean the difference between victory and defeat."

In the 40 districts surveyed (half of them poor, with many minority residents; the other half affluent, with few), more than nine million ballots were cast. More than 200,000, or 2.2 percent, were not counted in the presidential race.

Six kinds of voting equipment were in use in the 40 districts: punch-card machines, lever machines, paper ballots, electronic systems and two types of optical-scan machines. One uses a counting machine in the polling place and alerts the voter to a faulty ballot; another is linked to a central counter and does not provide an alert.

While districts consisting predominantly of poor people and members of minorities generally had higher rates of uncounted votes on all voting equipment than affluent districts, the differences narrowed considerably when modern technology was used.

For instance, when voters used old-fashioned punch cards, the rate of uncounted votes averaged 7.7 percent in poor districts and 2 percent in affluent ones. But when they used optical-scan systems that alerted them to a faulty ballot, the percentage of uncounted votes was 1.1 in poor districts and 0.5 in affluent ones.

The two districts with the highest rates of uncounted ballots, 7.9 percent, were in Chicago and Miami. Both are poor districts, and both used punch cards. But the Seventh District in western Alabama, where 31 percent of the people live in poverty and 68 percent are members of minorities, actually had the lowest percentage of uncounted ballots of the 40 districts surveyed, only 0.3. The Seventh District has modern voting technology.

"I think when people see this report, Democrats and Republicans alike, they'll want to do something," Mr. Waxman said Saturday. "We hope. It's a national problem."

He acknowledged that counting more votes cast by poor and minority voters might seem to help Democrats more than Republicans. "But you never know how people are going to vote in the future," he said, recalling that the South was once a Democratic bastion.

In any event, Mr. Waxman said, "That can't be the basis for how you hold elections."