hile playing bystander at a recount can be
excruciatingly boring, it has its moments. For one thing, there's
something reassuring about watching a trio of Democratic, Republican
and Naderite observers intensely scrutinizing document after
document and broadly agreeing with each other on the intentions of
each voter. In addition, the monotonous seriousness of the
undertaking is frequently relieved by evidence of the determined
individuality of the American voter--the write-in votes for "God,"
the straight-ticket Republican voter who deviated only to write in
Ralph Nader's name and the editorialist who left Bush's name alone
but pointedly and emphatically crossed out Cheney's. Punctuating the
hushed, at times reverent atmosphere of the counting hall in a
nondescript corner room in New Hampshire's low-security Legislative
Office Building is the occasional ejaculation "Object!" by an
official observer who has found fault with an incorrectly or
ambiguously marked ballot. The fate of these challenged documents is
generally left to the seasoned eye of the secretary of state, in
this case New Hampshire's William Gardner, a fourteen-term Democrat
who is widely respected and appears studiously fair. Of course, the
objectivity of the process will depend greatly on local conditions.
In Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, many questioned the neutrality of
election officials who were also self-avowed partisans.
New Hampshire may not be typical of other states, in part because
it is so small, but it has some important lessons to offer:
§ Transparency is the only way
to go. New Hampshire resolutely refuses to use any ballot-counting
technology that does not leave a paper trail; it will not use the
"black box" touch-screens that have been installed throughout the
country, and now record the votes of 29 percent of Americans. Thus
every New Hampshire voter fills out a paper ballot. Only the
counting mechanism varies--some localities use optical scanners from Diebold or another vendor, and others stick with hand counts. This
means that as long as a candidate can be found to request a recount
and someone can be found to pay for it, the citizens of New
Hampshire can be fairly sure that their votes will be properly
counted.
§ Third parties do play honest broker. Only a candidate can
ask for a recall. With Bush having no incentive to do so, and Kerry
having no interest in contesting the results in a state he won,
there would be no advocate for accountability if Ralph Nader had not
been in the race.
§ We should be deluged with statistics, but we aren't. New
Hampshire is a distinct rarity, in that it posts election totals,
right down to the precinct level, on the Internet--for anyone to
see.
But New Hampshire is far from infallible. For one thing, thanks
to a complicated formula reflecting Republicans' majority-party
status, the GOP has in recent years always been listed first on the
ballot. Hence, general election ballot choices come in the following
order: -Straight-ticket Republican
-Straight-ticket
Democratic
-Presidential race, Republican
candidate
-Presidential race, Democratic candidate
-Statewide
race, Republican candidate
-Statewide race, Democratic
candidate
-Local race, Republican candidates (in multimember
districts, in alphabetical order)
-Local race, Democratic
candidates (in multimember districts, in alphabetical order)
Numerous studies have found that ballot sequence determines
preference in enough cases to make a decisive difference, especially
in close races. And as Paul Twomey, a Democratic activist and
attorney handling a case about ballot order, put it to me, "A
Democratic [state representative] candidate whose name starts with a
W doesn't have a chance in hell of getting elected." That's an
exaggeration, but only just. Randomly assigning ballot slots would
certainly help eliminate this bias.
The straight-vote system is itself deeply problematical. When a
person marks the "Straight Republican" or "Straight Democratic"
option, all unmarked specific races are assigned to that party's
candidate. Even if a voter marks a "straight" ticket and then marks
several races for the opposing party's candidate, all unmarked
spaces are assumed to be votes for the favored party. Officials I
spoke to in New Hampshire conceded that, in all likelihood, many of
those choosing the straight-ticket option hadn't read or properly
absorbed the instructions, and so wrongly assumed they were merely
indicating their party affiliation or registration rather than their
intention to give all their votes to one party.
** When the results from the first two precincts did not bear out
Ida Briggs's theory that something was amiss, Briggs wasn't the only
bewildered party. Democrats and Naderites wondered how, in a state
where Kerry did well, urban Democrats could have favored
Bush--especially since these anomalous voters tended to have voted
on Diebold equipment.
The best guess I heard was that although many of those urban Bush
voters were Democrats, they were socially conservative, and many
were Catholics who had been targeted by implicitly anti-Kerry
letters from their bishop and leafleting campaigns in church parking
lots. And, said State Senator Lou D'Allesandro, a Democrat from
Manchester, despite the vaunted Democratic get-out-the-vote effort,
the Republicans did a better job of getting out their base--even in
urban areas, and even including sympathetic Democrats. Another
factor was that some wards had substantial population growth since
the last presidential election, and as long as the new residents
were an unknown factor, it didn't make sense to assume anything
about them. In other precincts, Kerry did fairly well among moderate
Republicans who couldn't stomach Bush but who were not especially
socially conservative.
Nonetheless, when the counters return after Thanksgiving, they'll
still have some technical problems to resolve. The hand count of a
third precinct showed roughly 100 fewer presidential votes than the
optical-scan machines had, and will likely have to be recounted yet
again. And in a fourth one, a local Republican candidate being
recounted was awarded 105 more votes than he had before. Was the
problem Diebold or somebody in the counting room? The answer will
soon be clear.
What's already evident is this: As a country, we've never come to
terms with the fact that the entire voting and tabulation process,
electronic or otherwise, is rife with potential errors, many of them
emanating from human beings, whether programmers or counters. Or
that, imperfect and "inefficient" as they may be, hand-marked paper
ballots offer the best possibility of finding those errors. And
rebuilding trust in the process.