Let the recounts begin

By Brian Friel

updated 4:15 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2006

WASHINGTON - Democracy's dirty little secret: Vote counting is a messy business. In nearly every election, votes that shouldn't be counted are, and votes that should be counted aren't. In the 2004 election, at least 850,000 ballots cast somewhere in the nation were never counted, the federal Election Assistance Commission estimates.

Some voters inadvertently invalidated their absentee ballots by failing to sign them. Other absentee ballots were signed but weren't counted because scanners failed to detect a signature.

But voters who showed up at a polling place didn't necessarily have better luck: Some lacked proper identification, or were directed to the wrong precinct. Others discovered that they weren't registered, that their names had been purged from voter rolls, or that someone had already voted in their name. Most of these frustrated folks were allowed to cast provisional ballots, but many of those ballots were not counted.

When a race isn't tight enough for contested ballots to matter, or when the results are not within what election experts call "the margin of litigation," election officials and the political parties' official observers generally accept the imperfections and move on. That's what happens in most races. It's quite a different matter when the vote count for an important office is very close.

The 2004 governor's race in Washington state was ultimately decided by 133 votes out of 2.8 million cast. After losing two recounts to Republican Dino Rossi, Democrat Christine Gregoire was finally pushed over the goal line by the discovery, during recount No. 3, of several hundred absentee ballots that a faulty scanner had missed. A state judge upheld her victory, despite also ruling that more than 1,600 ballots were cast illegally, many by felons without voting rights. The court couldn't determine how many of those illegal votes had been cast for each gubernatorial candidate.

With the 2006 general election fast approaching, some election observers are predicting widespread chaos at the polls. "We may be only three weeks away from repeating the 2000 Florida voting debacle," John Fund, a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote a book on election fraud, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on October 13. He warned that not one but several states could see "allegations of voter fraud, intimidation, and manipulation of voting machines [in addition to] the generalized chaos that sent that presidential election into overtime."

Others, including Texas-based political consultant Ray Martinez, argue that the nation's voting systems have improved since 2004, thanks to a 2002 federal law that established numerous new guidelines for conducting elections and poured $3 billion into state and local election administrators' coffers for new voting machines and voter-registration databases. "Elections are intensely human," said Martinez, a former vice chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, which administered the $3 billion in federal funding under the 2002 Help America Vote Act. "When you add so much complexity -- federal mandates, state mandates, new equipment, statewide databases -- to an endeavor so dependent on human interaction, you're bound to get mistakes. But I certainly believe our democracy is strong enough to survive some necessary bumps along the way to achieve an effective election system in the long run."

Observers generally agree that the voting process will encounter bumps on November 7. In close races, those bumps could lead to extended legal battles to determine the outcome of congressional and gubernatorial contests. Indeed, in anticipation of Election Day problems, legal battles have been raging all year over who will be allowed to cast ballots on November 7. "The most significant voter disenfranchisement happens not in November but in October and September and all year round," said Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

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