National Election Survey Reveals Uncounted Ballots

National Election Survey Reveals Uncounted Ballots - Via Threat Level:

The federal Election Assistance Commission -- the agency created after the 2000 presidential debacle that is tasked with overseeing voting machine testing and serving as a clearinghouse for election administration information -- published a survey of the 2006 election today that reveals some interesting stats.

The information, collected from election administrators nationwide, covers the number of registered voters per jurisdiction, voter turnout, types of voting systems used, percentage of votes cast by absentee and provisional ballots, etc.

One interesting nugget concerns the number of ballots cast vs. ballots counted in the election.

According to the report, about 82 million ballots were "cast or counted" in the 2006 election (the number isn't exact because not every jurisdiction responded to the survey). But some 3.2 million ballots that were cast never got counted. [I should note here that it's really confusing that the EAC refers to the 82 million ballots as "cast or counted" since it isn't possible for a ballot to be counted if it wasn't cast -- at least not a legal ballot. It would have been better for the report to just say "82 million ballots were cast."]

[...]Editor: Interesting graphic removed. Go to original site for that [...]
The report provides a table showing the number of ballots that went uncounted by state (see the middle column in the table at right). For example, in Florida 122,759 ballots went uncounted in 2006. In California, the number was 416,260 ballots. Illinois held the record, however, with a whopping 889,012 uncounted ballots.

Some of these figures seem less severe when you look at them as percentages (in California, for example, the 400,000 uncounted ballots amount to a little less than 5 percent of the ballots that were cast). But this isn't likely to be of consolation to voters who made the effort to cast a ballot but never had their vote counted or to candidates who may have lost their races by narrow margins and could have used the extra push from uncounted ballots. And the number of uncounted ballots in Illinois isn't helped by converting it to a percentage (nearly 25 percent of ballots cast in that state went uncounted).

So why do ballots go uncounted? It's not always clear.

Take provisional ballots for example. Although a little more than 794,000 provisional ballots were cast in polling places, only 79.5 percent of them were counted. Provisional ballots are given to voters who arrive at polls but whose name (for whatever reason) doesn't appear on the voter registration list (perhaps through clerical error or the voter showed up at the wrong precinct). The ballots are usually rejected if it turns out that the voter was ineligible to vote or had already voted by absentee ballot or at another polling location, but the report doesn't really specify.

With regard to absentee ballots that were cast in 2006, 347,000 of these never got counted. In some cases voters didn't return the ballots on time. In other cases, voters failed to sign the ballot envelope. But more than 52,000 ballots were rejected for "other" unspecified reasons.

To see what else the report covers, you can read it here (PDF). It would be great if all voting jurisdictions were required to participate in these post-election surveys so that stats like these could be more precise and more easily compared over time.

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