Chicago and suburban Cook County’s bold experiment in reducing election errors Tuesday left many voters confused by a new system that even election judges seemed to have trouble mastering.
In some precincts, the judges stopped voters from fixing their mistakes. In others, voters who were informed that they had “undervoted” walked out of the polling places without a clear understanding of what that meant.
And though the new devices, deployed in Chicago and suburban Cook County for the first time Tuesday in a major election, alerted voters that they had failed to cast ballots in certain contests–or undervoted–few voters took the opportunity to change them.
“It’s been a bumpy ride,” an exasperated Langdon Neal, chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, said Tuesday.
“The good news is the equipment seems to be working well. The not-so-good news is our judges are having trouble administering the election. There’s a big learning curve out there, and they’re struggling.”
The expectation among election officials was that the new equipment would fix the problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election when thousands of votes went uncounted because of dimpled and hanging chads due to ballot cards that weren’t sufficiently punched to register the votes.
The new system was aimed at eliminating the problem by informing voters that they either had voted twice in a particular contest or hadn’t voted at all. A ballot fed into the tabulating machines would flash a warning.
Officials declare a success
Despite the glitches, election officials declared Tuesday a success. County Clerk David Orr said he got favorable reviews from voters and election judges who praised the system for alerting them of potential errors.
Election judges said the new system also sped the tabulating process. After the polls closed, the devices beamed in their results without the delay in past years of election judges feeding ballots into the machines from a box.
And though there had been predictions of long lines at polling places as voters were given the option to fix their ballots, the logjam never materialized.
Still, there was plenty of evidence that the system was in need of fine-tuning.
At Neil Elementary School on South Michigan Avenue near 86th Street, election judge Oscar Irvin told dozens of voters that the ballot machine told them they had undervoted because they had failed to make a choice in a judicial race.
“The machine says you didn’t vote for all the judges,” he told voters. “Do you want your ballot to stand as it is?”
If they said yes, he would push an override button that cause the machine to swoop up the ballot.
Trouble is, the machine actually tells nothing of the sort. In fact, the system was set up to ensure secrecy, telling the judge and the voter that they had undervoted, but not designating in which race.
Irvin had misinterpreted a message from the machine that begins “Judge:” and then goes on to tell the election judge what to say to the voter.
Election watchdog groups Tuesday maintained that the impact of the new error-detection equipment appeared minimal because it couldn’t distinguish between when voters accidentally failed to vote in a race or when they deliberately did so, as voters commonly do in the more obscure contests.
Poll watchers with the American Civil Liberties Union and Project LEAP, an anti-election-fraud group, also expressed concerns about the amount of conversation the new procedures spurred between election judges and voters as voters figured out whether to go back to a booth to revote.
“This is interactive voting,” said Arlene Rubin, executive director of Project LEAP. “There is more conversation about your ballot with election judges than we’ve ever had.”
At the same time, she praised the intentions of election authorities and said the changes reduced some opportunities for fraud. Election judges can no longer cancel ballots by failing to place their initials on ballot cards as required.
Many voters observed at the polls assumed, or were led to assume, that an undervote notice was not a potential error but was a deliberate decision to skip a race, said Harvey Grossman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
“We saw practically no one revote,” he said. “In no case have we seen a judge describe an undervote as possibly an error in voting.”
As a result, he said, “Error notification is not having an impact on the voting process.”
Orr dismissed such concerns as overblown and said the ACLU was “looking for ammunition” for its ongoing federal lawsuit alleging that the punch-card system is prone to errors, disenfranchises poor minorities and cannot be adequately fixed.
“They’re starting from the faulty assumption that voters don’t know what they’re doing,” Orr said.
Many voters Tuesday expressed support for the new system, including those who opted not to use its error-correction features.
Emma Ford, 55, intended to vote her entire ballot at the Northwest Institute for Contemporary Learning on Division Street on the West Side.
But when the ballot counter told her at least one of her votes failed to register, she told the judge to cast the ballot anyway.
“If I missed anybody, I’m sure it wasn’t anybody I really wanted,” she said. “I just like to know that I did make a mistake and to have the opportunity to correct it. I’m willing to live with my mistake.”
Sometimes the ballot counting devices stumbled. In Schaumburg Township, the machines in one precinct refused to count any ballots early Tuesday–until someone pushed the right button.
“It was just spitting the ballots right back out” when voters tried to insert their punch cards in the counter at Nathan Hale School, said election judge Stephanie Parrish.
After judges summoned help from the county clerk’s office, the problem was solved by turning the machine off and on again.
While the ballot counter was down, about 25 voters had to deposit their ballots in the ballot box, just like before. Judges later fed these ballots into the counter after it was fixed.
Ballot comes back
At Woodbine School in Cicero, first-time voter Alexis Robles, 18, put her ballot in the machine, and it was kicked out as an undervote.
Democratic election judge Christina Perez swatted Robles’ hand away as she reached for her ballot, told her she had an undervote and pushed an override button, so the vote could be counted.
“She said something about that I had an undervote,” Robles said as she left the polling place. “I would have felt better if she would have explained what an undervote meant.”
