In Chicago and Cicero, where voting for particular candidates is sometimes seen as another job requirement, election officials are under judicial orders to activate an error-detection system next week that some say could double as a high-tech aid to the watchful eyes of ward bosses.
In what the voting machine’s manufacturer and state officials call an unusual arrangement, voters will be alerted by the machine if they fail to mark a choice in a contest and be given a second chance to correct their ballots.
That feature goes beyond the safeguards implemented in many cities and counties around the country where voting equipment is programmed to reject ballots on which voters have marked too many choices in a contest.
The experiment, which will also be done Tuesday in a handful of suburbs holding primaries, is designed to reduce problems that caused a large number of ballots to be thrown out in last fall’s presidential election.
The effort to eliminate accidental undervotes is being hailed by the Illinois Democratic Party, the American Civil Liberties Union and local election officials as a way to help ensure that every vote counts.
“It’s terrific,” ACLU lawyer Adam Schwartz said. “This is a significant advance in voting rights.”
But the plan has raised concerns among some state election officials that the system could pose a potential threat to the fundamental principle of ballot secrecy–the right not to vote for a particular office without detection.
“There’s a fairly serious problem,” said Al Zimmer, general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, of the system put into place as a result of a court order earlier this month by Cook County Circuit Judge Julia Nowicki.
Correcting overvotes is not a new concept. It is allowed in Illinois in the handful of counties with optical-scan voting systems, in which voters select candidates by filling in bubbles similar to a standardized test. But under a quirk of state law, overvote detection is barred in counties like Cook that use older punch-card technology.
That disparity sparked two lawsuits after the November election, when more than 122,000 Chicago and Cook County ballots failed to register a vote for president.
More than 6 percent of voters failed to register a vote for president, twice the rate of previous presidential elections. Worse, in some Chicago wards with large minority populations, more than 12 percent of the ballots lacked a countable vote for president.
At a news conference Thursday, Cook County Clerk David Orr demonstrated the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100, purchased in 1999 as part of a $26 million voting equipment overhaul. Had voting protection features been used in November, Orr estimated that four out of five of the uncounted ballots would have been successfully cast..
“If we would’ve been allowed to use the voter protection system in November, we would not have had the problem,” he said. But the mechanics of alerting voters to undervotes has some worried. If a voter deliberately decides to skip a race–just as if an error occurred due to hanging chads or improperly poked holes–the machine will kick back a ballot.
“Ballot Not Accepted,” a message on the machine will read. “See Election Judge.”
A printout will inform the election judge that an undercount occurred somewhere on the ballot. The voter may tell the election judge to disregard the message and submit the ballot.
But voters who wish to correct ballots will have to decipher the computer card to determine where the problem occurred. If a voter asks an election judge to help find the undervoted race, that could lead to problems, Zimmer said. “Since election judges are nominated by the political parties, the likelihood is the election judge is not an entirely disinterested person,” he saidSteve Brown, spokesman for the Illinois Democratic Party, which last month sued Illinois, Cook County and Chicago election officials for the right to use error-detection technology, dismissed the fears as based on an outdated notion of Chicago’s legendary political machine.
“They’re caught up in urban legend,” he said. “This gives way too much credit to the monolithic image of the Democratic Party. Our goal is to get every vote counted.”
Dan McGinnis, vice president of Election Systems & Software, the largest producer and installer of election systems in the U.S. and the maker of Cook County’s punch-card ballot system, said he was unaware of any other election jurisdiction that would reject ballots if any one office fails to reflect a vote.
