Published: June 02, 2006 01:15 pm      

New machines to reduce residual votes, officials say

JACKSON — It has been an election problem for decades. People go to the polls, cast their ballots, but because of some error, the votes aren’t counted.

Residual voting — ballots cast during an election on which voters failed to mark a choice or machines did not record it — will be greatly reduced in Mississippi as counties begin using state-of-the-art voting machines, officials said.

The old punch card and lever machines have been replaced by new touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold. Of Mississippi’s 82 counties, 77 have bought new machines under the Help America Vote Act, a federal law that requires states to replace outdated election equipment.

“Every voter needs to have absolute confidence that his vote or her vote is counted the way he or she intends so that people have confidence in their government,” David Blount, spokesman for Secretary of State Eric Clark, said Thursday after a pre-election day briefing for the media.

On Tuesday, voters will use the machines for the first time in the Democratic primaries for one U.S. Senate seat and two of Mississippi’s four U.S. House seats. There is no Republican primary.

Representatives from Utah Lt. Gov. Gary R. Herbert’s office will observe the Mississippi elections because voters in that state will go to the polls on June 27.

“We just want to come check it out, see how it’s going and see if there’s anything we can learn from what Mississippi is doing,” said Joe Demma, Herbert’s chief of staff.

Demma said the Diebold machines have been used in two municipal elections in Utah, but the this month’s primaries are the first statewide elections.

“We’re going to spend over $1 million on voter outreach and education,” Demma said. “In terms of residual voting, under voting and voter apathy, you’re never going to be able to dictate to the voter what they can and can’t do. You’re always going to have people to vote for the United States president and that’s it.”

David Bear, a spokesman for Allen, Texas-based Diebold Election Systems, said the machines already have been used in Ohio and Pennsylvania elections this year. Other states that will use Diebold machines in 2006 are Georgia, Maryland, Utah and other various counties across the country. So far, there hasn’t been any complaint, he said.

“Intuitively, some election officials thought voters were going to be worried about this new technology. The voters actually have shown a preference to the technology,” Bear said.

Bear said the machines eliminate residual voting because the voter is told whether there was an inadvertent over-vote or under-vote before the ballot is cast.

“If residual voting is defined by voter error, it’s eliminated,” Blount said.

In 2005, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project found that the national residual vote of ballots cast for president was 1.9 percent in 2000. The residual vote fell to 1.1 percent in 2004 after many states upgraded their equipment, according to the analysis.

Blount said his research in Mississippi found that Quitman County had the state’s highest residual vote rate of 20.6 percent. Blount said 3,416 votes were cast for president in Quitman County in 2004, but 4,118 votes were cast for congressman.

Quitman County circuit clerk Brenda Wiggs said there will always be an under-vote.

“Some people don’t want to vote on some elections. They may be going to vote on one election or not know anybody in the other race,” Wiggs said, adding that over-voting is impossible to do on the Diebold machines.

“It might be a problem on the absentee ballots we send out,” she said.