Will Ohio Have Another Problematic Presidential Election?

It's election year in Ohio, likely to be pivotal in the presidential contest. Everyone expects a close race. Yet there's great concern about whether the state's election infrastructure can hold up to the pressure that will be upon it. Of special concern is the voting equipment to be used, particularly in the state's largest and most diverse county. Another worry is provisional ballots, upon which the state increasingly relies for registration problems, voters who lack proper ID, and those who've moved. If the election is close enough, the two major parties could wind up fighting over which provisional ballots should count. The specter of litigation thus hangs heavy over the state. To top it all off, there have been repeated accusations of partisanship by Ohio's chief election official, the Secretary of State, from the opposing party.

Any of this sound familiar?

When the nation's attention focuses more intently on battleground states later this year, many will no doubt scratch their heads and wonder what the State of Ohio has been up to since 2004. In reality, there have been plenty of changes, some of them for the better. But many of the same issues remain. This comment discusses three big ones: voting equipment, provisional ballots, and allegations of partisanship. It remembers the past while looking ahead to the future, in light of some brand new information from the March primary.

Voting Equipment

This is one area in which there have been significant improvements since 2004, when most voters throughout the state still used "hanging chad" punch card voting systems. The result was that tens of thousands of ballots didn't register a vote for President. Elsewhere in the country, voters used newer voting equipment that provided voters with notice and an opportunity to correct errors. Such "notice" voting equipment combined, with better procedures, saved about one million votes that would otherwise have been lost in 2004.

By 2006, Ohio counties had finally switched to notice voting technology, of either the electronic touchscreen or precinct-count optical scan variety. Both types of systems allow voters to check for overvotes, and thus reduce the number of uncounted votes. The bad news is that Cuyahoga County, the state's biggest county which includes Cleveland, had well-documented problems implementing the Diebold touchscreen system it decided to buy. Among the problems was that somewhere around 20% of the paper records generated by the system were damaged or unreadable, something that's especially problematic given that Ohio law makes paper the official ballot of record.

As a result, Cuyahoga County switched again, using a non-notice optical scan ballot system in the March 2008 primary. The ACLU sued, arguing that votes would predictably be lost due to the switch, but a federal district judge declined to order the county to use a notice system so close to election day. (Disclosure: I consulted with the ACLU on that case.)

The result was that Cuyahoga County used a non-notice system in the March primary. So how did things go? At first glance, it didn't look so bad. The county initially reported 818 overvotes at the time of its unofficial count. (This page now seems to have been removed from the Secretary of State's website.) That's more than any other county but one, but still relatively low when you consider the total turnout of 436,609 in that county.

Some brand new information explains the suspiciously low number of overvotes initially reported. The earlier figure didn't include ballots that would have been overvotes, but had been "remade" so as to avoid being rejected by tabulating equipment. The practice of remaking, as the name suggests, involves marking a new ballot that replicates what election officials believe to be the voter's intended choices, when a ballot is mismarked. Until today, there wasn't publicly available information on how many ballots had been "remade" but I've just received information from the Cuyahoga Board of Elections that that there were really over 4000 overvotes:

During the Unofficial Count, the M650 Optical Scan units were programmed to accept and count overvotes, allowing all ballots to scan through the machines without stopping. A total of 4,117 overvotes were recorded within the 406,450 votes counted in the Unofficial Canvass, equaling 1.01% of the total votes cast. ... All ballots containing overvotes were examined by a BOE Management Team to determine whether the voter clearly intended to vote for a single candidate. Of the 4,117 overvotes, it was determined that 1,240 contained a clear indication of the voter's intent. Those ballots were remade ... reducing the overvote total to 2,877.

The translation is that there were a lot more overvotes than the county originally reported (though "406,450 votes" should, I think, be "406,450 ballots," making the percentage smaller than reported). The number of overvotes was reduced from 4,117 by remaking ballots, in accordance with what the board's management team deemed the "clear indication of the voter's intent."