Election reformers eye next vote

After an election that, relatively speaking, lacked major voting problems, election reform activists have started to refine their focus.

On the surface, voting went well and lacked the extended recounts and lawsuits of 2000, despite widely reported fears to the contrary from pollsters, ballot watchers and politicians. Public reaction was generally favorable about the conduct of the election, even among those who did not like the outcome, in a year when turnout nationally and on a state level was as high as expected.

There were problems, however, but none of them affected the outcome of major races. Locally, a programming error in Utah County caused approximately 33,000 straight party votes to be ignored, while on a national scale there were reports of electronic voting machines that lost ballots in North Carolina, crashed voting machines in Louisiana and miscounted ballots in Ohio.

It's those problems, and other possible incongruities in the vote counting, that have driven Kathy Dopp, a Park City-based voting activist, to undertake a study of potential problem areas around the country. Involved since early last year with a group fighting to stop the state from rushing the installation of new voting equipment, she now plans to conduct a statistical study of potential problem areas, especially in those places — such as many counties in Florida and Ohio — where voters cast their ballots on electronic machines.

"There are huge amounts of problems with e-voting machines," Dopp said. "There are more problems than in 2000, but it didn't happen in a way which triggered a stalemate in the presidential election."

Along with electronic machines, she is also studying those areas where the exit polls and the actual results were very different.

"Anybody who studies statistics and math and understands the theory of exit polls, they understand that the probability of the exit polls being wrong 10 out of 11 times is practically nil," she said.

Dopp actually started a mini-firestorm of her own in the days following the election, when she posted a raw analysis of results from Florida counties that compared the actual vote totals with the number of voters registered with a party and the expected results.

While she posted a disclaimer that "no conclusion to the actual causes of the patterns" can be taken from the numbers, her study spread quickly through political blogs, eventually drawing the attention of national media.