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By Sarah Left, 17 November 2000 12:00

COMMENT As the US presidential election stubbornly refuses to draw to a conclusion, voters here are questioning the technology they use to cast their votes. Voters in Palm Beach County, Florida are unlikely to accept a repeat of the punch card voting system that has caused so much upset over the last week and a half. With George W Bush currently just over 300 votes ahead of Al Gore, four contested - and largely Democratic - communities in southern Florida believe poor ballot design and antiquated technology may have cost their man the election. The county has seen 19,000 voters disenfranchised by over-votes, where a voter has chosen more than one candidate for office. That number is "phenomenally high", according to Kim Brace, president of Election Data Services, a Washington DC-based election administration consultancy. Brace explained that in a normal election, about 2 per cent of ballots do not count towards a presidential vote. About 98 per cent of those are because voters did not choose a candidate, with only two percent disqualified because of an over-vote. Brace said: "There were way too many over-votes in Palm Beach County. Nineteen thousand
over-votes is a 62 per cent drop off rate, rather than the 2 per cent we normally see." The frailties of the punch cards have been more than apparent in Florida. Nearly a third of US voters use this system to choose a president, and until now, none of them have been aware of one of the system's major vulnerabilities: the chad. A chad is the tiny circle of paper that should drop away when a voter punches a vote into the ballot. But it seems chads have a nasty habit of hanging on and wreaking havoc with the electronic vote-counting equipment. "I didn't realise that the election officials are willing to accept a significant margin of error," said Mike Paris, an attorney who voted in Broward County, another contested county just south of Palm Beach. "It never occurred to me that they're not accurately counted." Many voters are feeling the same amazement that vote-counting in the internet age is still in such question. Sid Sobel, an accountant in Palm Beach County, argues: "With all our great technology, electronic voting is the way it should be. A computerised ballot will pick up an error and make you recast the vote if an error is made." Paris is less sure of the electronic voting option: "What if there's a power failure? What about the possibility of hacking? But most of all, there's no manual back-up and that's disturbing." But Ann Israel, an office manager in Palm Beach County, is willing to consider computerised voting and sees no reason to trust a paper trail. She said: "We don't know where the box with the paper ballots goes. And some areas vote with a lever system, where there's also no manual back-up." Kim Brace, of Election Data Services, says that every system has its drawbacks, and the biggest drawback with computer-based voting is the lack of a paper ballot that can be counted by hand if necessary. "There is no system that is most accurate," he said. "There is a trade-off between cost and accuracy, but every system can be accurate. The issue in Palm Beach County is improper ballot design that led some voters to choose more than one Presidential candidate. With the punch card system, you can have 10 machines in a polling place for the same cost as one or two computerised machines." The only clarity to emerge from the 2000 election fiasco is that US voters now have a healthy distrust of voting systems. Most want to see a standard ballot and voting system across the entire country, so that any errors that do occur will at least occur in roughly the same numbers in every area.