Shortly after the California election last October, Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky, the two pollsters in charge of all exit polling in 2004 for the major news organizations, reported that about 5,000 votes in the election were almost certainly misrecorded. The problem: a "California version of the infamous butterfly ballot."
That ballot, as you may recall, was used in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, although only in Palm Beach County. Designed to make voting easier for the elderly, it actually made voting more confusing.
The problem with that ballot was that the punch holes for the candidates were all located in the middle of the ballot, with the names of some candidates on the left side of the page and some on the right. It happened that Pat Buchanan's name was on the right side of the page almost directly opposite Al Gore's name on the left, with the punch holes in the middle -- Buchanan's punch hole just above Gore's. The voter who didn't recognize right away that the punch hole slightly above Gore's name was for the candidate on the right side of the page could very well have punched a vote for Buchanan when it was really intended for Gore.
Support for that hypothesis came from the results -- Buchanan received 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, but no more than 1,200 votes in any other county, and afterward many voters complained of being confused. Bush's official margin in the state was just over 500 votes, while Gore's vote total was estimated to be about 2,000 votes higher had the votes in Palm Beach County been accurately recorded. The discrepancy was so stark that The Palm Beach Post concluded that Gore lost the national election because of the butterfly ballot alone.
In California, 13 counties used Diebold's Accuvote Optical Scan voting equipment, which included a ballot that presented the candidates' names in three columns. To the left side of each name was the punch mark for that candidate. A vertical line separated the three columns of names. An examination of the ballot shows that just to the right of each name in the left column was a punch mark -- for the name in the center column. If a voter wanted to indicate support for the name in the left column, he or she should have punched the mark at the left of the name. But many apparently punched the mark to the right of the name.
How do we know that? Minor candidates listed directly to the right of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cruz Bustamante, and Tom McClintock -- the three top candidates in the election -- all got much higher support in the 11 counties where they were listed that way than in any other county in the state. The three candidates were Ronald Jason Palmieri, Jerry Kunzman, and Randall D. Sprague.
|
Counties using Accuvote Optical Scan |
|||
|
Palmieri |
Kunzman |
Sprague |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
|
|
Tulare |
1.44 |
1.01 |
0.79 |
|
Fresno |
0.30 |
0.21 |
0.05 |
|
Lassen |
0.68 |
0.37 |
0.14 |
|
Humboldt |
0.58 |
0.52 |
0.17 |
|
Santa Barbara |
0.11 |
0.08 |
0.04 |
|
Kern |
0.08 |
0.05 |
0.02 |
|
Modoc |
0.09 |
0.03 |
0.06 |
|
San Joaquin |
0.09 |
0.16 |
0.08 |
|
Siskiyou |
0.09 |
0.01 |
0.02 |
|
Placer |
0.05 |
0.04 |
0.03 |
|
San Luis Obispo |
0.06 |
0.04 |
0.02 |
|
Average percentage in 11 counties above |
0.25 |
0.19 |
0.10 |
|
All other counties |
0.02 |
0.00 |
0.01 |
|
State Total |
0.04 |
0.02 |
0.02 |
The average percentage of the vote received by Palmieri in the 11 counties using the Accuvote Optical Scan equipment was 0.25%, by Kunzman 0.19%, and by Sprague 0.10%. In all other counties, however, Palmieri received only 0.02%, Kunzman 0.00% and Sprague 0.10%.
As Lenski and Mitofsky note,
"In other words, Palmieri, Kunzman and Sprague received more than ten times the percentage of the vote in these 11 Accuvote Optical Scan counties than in the other 47 counties. This added about 4,900 votes to their combined total."
Lenski and Mitofsky concluded that "this misrecording of votes could have become an issue if the replacement election had turned out to be as close as the presidential election in Florida in 2000." Schwarzenegger beat his closest competitor by more than 17 percentage points.
Problems such as these in vote counting led the American Association for Public Opinion Research to adopt the motto (for its 2001 annual meeting): "Polls -- Now More Accurate Than the Election Itself."