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Report: Vote upgrades saved 1-million ballots

Improvements to voting machines and election administration saved a million votes that otherwise would likely have gone uncounted in the 2004 elections, an academic analysis says.

The report released Monday by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project looked at a key measure of election integrity: residual votes, or ballots cast during an election on which voters failed to mark a choice or machines did not record it.

In every election, some voters intentionally leave the presidential contest blank, possibly as a protest or because they're uninterested. But experts estimate that those votes should amount to about half of one percent of all ballots, and anything above that is likely caused by flaws with design, equipment or voter education.

In 2000, the national residual vote was 1.9 percent of ballots cast for president. The report found a significant improvement in 2004, with the residual vote falling to 1.1 percent. The analysis examined 37 states and the District of Columbia. Florida's rate fell sharply, from 2.9 percent to 0.4 percent.

The report "provides some corrective to what's getting to be a common interpretation of this election, which is that the election was deeply flawed and things were worse in 2004 than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, the report's author and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor.

"By this measure - which is a measure that people were trying to improve on - things were significantly better in 2004 than in 2000," he said.

The report also concluded:

--The greatest improvements in residual votes occurred where two things happened together: states undertook overall improvements in administration and voter education, and counties upgraded voting machines. Places where punch card machines were replaced showed particularly strong gains.

--Florida, the scene of the 2000 postelection stalemate, and Georgia had the biggest drop in residual votes. Georgia went from 3.5 percent to 0.4 percent. Both states underwent comprehensive reforms, with Georgia putting in electronic voting machines statewide, Florida scrapping punch cards and both launching ambitious voter education campaigns.

--The five states that worsened included three that made little if any changes to their voting machines: Connecticut, Iowa and Nebraska. California and Indiana also saw a rise in residual votes.

The voting problems of 2000 spurred a federal law that has so far distributed $2.2-billion to states to upgrade equipment, centralize voting registration and improve election practices.

[Last modified February 15, 2005, 01:17:05]