But in Georgia, one-third of the election districts did not record a single provisional ballot in 2004. (Provisional ballots are given to voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls - studies show that minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number of such ballots.) Ohio recorded 153,000 provisional ballots. A patchwork quilt of state rules governs voter registration and provisional ballots. Thousands of precincts - including 70 percent of Ohio's machines - still use punch-card ballots, which have a high error rate. Congress imposed only the minimal national standards and included too few dollars. Because of improved technology "nationwide, we counted perhaps 1 million votes that we would have lost four years ago."īut much work remains. "Viewed dispassionately, the national elections ran much more smoothly than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in voting behavior and methodology. To a point, it has had the desired effect. The intent was to help states upgrade aging voting machines and ensure that eligible voters are not turned away. Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. ![]() After the 2000 election debacle, which ended with a 36-day partisan standoff in Florida and an election decided by the U.S. But they acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000 registered voters. ![]() "We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't want to minimize that."įranklin County election officials - evenly split between Republicans and Democrats - say they allocated machines based on past voting patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. Foley, who is director of the election law program at the Ohio State University law school and a former Ohio state solicitor. "There isn't enough to prove fraud, but there have been very significant problems in running elections in Ohio this year that demand reform," said Edward B. ![]() Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged. In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours - many leaving without voting. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates.
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