Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Bad ballot numbers hit new low

TALLAHASSEE - The banishment of chad helped lead to the lowest level of invalid ballots ever measured in a presidential or gubernatorial election in Florida, a report released Tuesday said.

Floridians cast about 1.5-million more votes in the 2004 presidential election than in the disputed 2000 contest, yet the combined number of overvotes and undervotes fell about 83 percent, from 179,855 to 31,453, according to the report by the Department of State.

President Bush carried the state by nearly 381,000 votes.

Overvotes are ballots on which more than one candidate for an office is selected, nullifying both selections. Undervotes are ballots on which no candidate is selected.

In 2000, 2.9 percent of all ballots cast were invalid because of overvotes and undervotes. That dropped to 0.78 percent in the 2002 gubernatorial election and 0.41 percent in November.

Punch card ballots were outlawed after Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes in an election in which thousands of ballots were examined during five weeks of recounts. On many, the tiny rectangles of cardboard that were supposed to be punched out by voters were merely dimpled or left hanging, making it harder for machines to read them.

Since then, Floridians either vote on touch screen machines or with optical scan ballots, which require voters to mark a ballot which is later read by a machine. It is impossible to cast overvotes on a touch screen machine; Florida's 4,116 overvotes were all cast on optical scan machines.

A comparison of undervotes showed an insignificant difference between optical scan and touch screen ballots. Of optical scan ballots cast, 0.40 percent were left blank in the presidential race, compared with 0.42 percent on touch screen ballots.

[Last modified February 2, 2005, 00:31:09]