Wyoming Had Higher Percentage of Untallied Votes Than Florida By Michael Betsch CNSNews.com Editorial Assistant July 19, 2001

(CNSNews.com) - In a story not picked up by the establishment press, predominantly Republican Wyoming had an even greater rate of unrecorded presidential votes last year than Florida did.

A 10-member team of mechanical engineers, computer scientists and political science professors from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology issued a 92-page report Monday showing surprisingly high rates of untallied presidential ballots in a handful of states, including Wyoming, the Casper Star-Tribune reported.

The report comes as other news outlets, including the New York Times, continue to report on the Florida recount and alleged voting irregularities.

On Sunday, the New York Times offered the results of a six-month investigation, showing that "under intense pressure from Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws."

Buried in the New York Times story was the conclusion that "it is impossible to know whether the outcome of the election would have been different" if the allegedly flawed overseas ballots had been treated consistently.

Wyoming 'Undervotes'

"Of everybody that turned out and cast a ballot in Wyoming, 3.6 percent of those either had a spoiled ballot for president, an unmarked ballot for president, or an uncounted vote for president," Thomas Pelfrey of CalTech told the Star-Tribune.

"Florida's incidence of residual voting [votes for president that did not count] is 2.9 percent, seven-tenths less than Wyoming's," the Star-Tribune reported. Pelfrey noted that nationwide, about 1.8 percent of presidential votes did not count for one reason or another.

Of particular interest is the abnormally high rate of rejected presidential votes -- "approaching 9 percent" -- that was recorded in two Wyoming counties where voters used optical-scanning devices, according to the report.

This unusually high occurrence of undervoting may be attributed to faulty ballot design, but it has yet to be examined Pelfrey told the Star-Tribune. Optical scanners "read" ballots that are marked by hand - a "fill-in-the-circle" method of voting.

The study concluded that mechanical or human error caused the majority of Wyoming's undervotes.

As in Florida, the widespread use of punch-card voting systems may account for many of Wyoming's spoiled ballots. But county clerks noted that "changing to optical scanners isn't cheap," and they said they have received no complaints from voters.

As for the 25 percent of unrecorded Wyoming ballots that were intentionally left blank, Deputy Secretary of State Patricia O'Brien Arp told the Star-Tribune, "I think sometimes people just choose to undervote on purpose, to say 'I just don't want any of the candidates on here.'"

Voting reform advocates nationwide have called for new electronic voting systems to remedy the problem of spoiled ballots and undervotes, but the authors of the study disagree.

The study found that the modern "touch-screen" systems, when compared with older punch cards or lever systems, had "comparatively poor performance" and were "inherently flawed and should not be used."

The study found that touch-screen systems may set various "technology traps," including programming bugs; over-responsive keys that scroll pages at a time; and difficulty correcting errors.

-- Anonymous, July 19, 2001