Was Your Vote Counted?

Hanging chads haven't made an appearance so far, but Florida's next-door neighbor Georgia seemed to encounter a few problems of its own during the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses. In addition to hourlong waits to vote reported early in the day, local radio station WMGT is now reporting that Obama officials have asked Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel to investigate complaints that elderly people in Atlanta received  calls offering to allow them to vote by phone—which is not in fact possible. Where do states stand on safeguarding against voting irregularities? NEWSWEEK's Katie Paul spoke with Doug Chapin, director of Pew's Electionline.org, a project developed in response to the 2000 election controversies, which currently has two dozen people stationed in various states to monitor the process. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: How are the elections going so far?
Doug Chapin: We haven't had anything really big come up. We're seeing the sorts of things we've come to expect in elections like this. It seems like every election we have a prominent elected official who has trouble casting a ballot, and this year that award goes to [Gov.] Jon Corzine in New Jersey, where the machines weren't working [as reported at time of publication; according to an elections official, human error, not technology, was the culprit]. What we've seen more of this time—and for now it appears isolated, but we'll have to wait a few more days to see if it really was—is problems with these new computerized poll books, checking in with a laptop rather than the good old green-and-white computer paper. There are a couple places that have had problems with that. We've had reports from Georgia, some from Illinois, and elsewhere. Also there are the scattered breakdowns, problems getting started, polls that can't open because the door is locked, that sort of thing. Now, at least, we're not seeing the kind of statewide snafu that puts one or more states in doubt. There has also been a tremendous uptick in the number of absentee and early votes, and it stands to reason that all those people not standing in line makes everything go a lot more smoothly on Election Day.

Are there any hot spots that you're watching closely?
One state that we're watching is Georgia, which is using its photo ID requirement for the first time in a federal election. I haven't yet seen any reports, except some about long lines, and it's not clear if that has to do with photo ID or if it's to do with these electronic poll books not working well or not starting properly. We're also watching Arizona, which also has an ID requirement. I haven't seen or heard any real problems on that. Finally, we're watching all the states that are using technology, either new or newish. Besides some electronic poll book breakdowns, we haven't seen anything concentrated so much that there's any kind of statewide problem.

So are these ID requirements hurting or helping?
It's a concern about fraud versus a concern about access to the polls. It'll be important in places like Georgia and Indiana, which also has a photo ID requirement, to see whether or not the fear that lots of people will be turned away actually comes to fruition. A colleague in Savannah says she hasn't seen anybody have a problem producing an ID to cast a ballot. I haven't yet seen any reports out of Georgia of a problem. If that bears out, it will certainly bolster those who support voter ID, because they'll be able to say that it doesn't have any impact on turnout. The flip side is that, potentially, the people who didn't have ID simply didn't bother to go to vote. So it won't settle the argument, but at least this will give us a little more data. There isn't a lot of data. Both sides in the photo ID debate have spent more time knocking down each other's arguments than advancing their own.

Are there any states that get gold stars on elections?
Connecticut transitioned to new voting technology and spent lots of time preparing its voters for switchover. So I think the fact that you don't hear a lot about problems there says a lot about preparation. Until today I hadn't heard of many problems out of Georgia. Georgia has a relationship with a local university that helps them set up the machines, design the ballots and train people to use them. I don't know if the scattered problems we're seeing today are just bad luck or if something else is going on. The states like Georgia and Connecticut that have invested time in preparing not just their voters but their poll workers and elections officials for new technology are the ones that tend to avoid the headlines you see on and after Election Day.

Is there anything new or unusual about this election?
The big thing in this election is that we're seeing in many states—Florida, California, Ohio, Colorado and others—a retreat from electronic voting on both sides of the aisle. You've got a Republican governor in Florida, Democratic secretaries of state in California and Ohio, and a Republican secretary of state in Colorado, all of whom have raised concerns about electronic voting and have either moved their states wholesale to paper-based balloting, as Florida has, or proposed that the state consider going to more paper balloting, as in Ohio. The big story in 2008 is the emergence of a buyer's market. Almost eight years after the presidential election in 2000 and more than five years after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, we still have a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what technology we want to use to cast ballots.