Wednesday, January 17, 2001

The mystery of the missing votes

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

It's official. Fayette County has bragging rights on at least two aspects of the Nov. 7 general election.

But where did the missing votes go?

First, the kudos: Of 51,175 voters registered in Fayette, 82.6 percent, or 42,766 voters, lined up at the polls. With that record, the county led the state in voter turnout, according to Elections manager Carolyn Combs' latest figures. And with only seven tenths of a percent of local votes listed as undervotes that is, ballots on which no presidential vote was recorded Fayette can also claim to be in the top six of Georgia's 159 counties.

In other words, 0.7 percent of ballots cast by Fayette voters failed to reflect a vote for president, a percentage bettered only by Cobb and Gwinnett counties, where 0.6 percent of ballots cast were undervotes; Marion with 0.1 percent; and Bryan and Emanuel with none. In numbers of actual voters, this means that 317 Fayette voters cast ballots that did not apply to any presidential candidate.

In neighboring Coweta County, 879 voters, or 2.7 percent, did not record votes for president. The counties with the greatest percentage of undervotes were Ben Hill and Randolph in south Georgia, where 18.8 percent and 15 percent of voters, respectively, cast no vote for president.

That's 1,080 voters in Ben Hill County, or about one in six. Fulton County's 6.3 percent works out to 17,764 voters who failed to record a vote for president. Statewide, 3.5 percent, or 94,681 voters, failed to vote for president, a ratio approximately double that of the United States as a whole. That's almost one out of every 30 ballots cast in Georgia.

There are several voting systems in place statewide, but no definitive pattern emerged in the extremes of undervotes noted above, according to data provided by the secretary of State's office. Here's how the systems work:

With the Opti-Scan/central count system, ballots are delivered by poll managers to machines in the county Elections Office, where they are scanned and counted as in Fayette and Coweta.

In the Opti-Scan/precinct count system, each precinct counts its own ballots by scanning machine. Cobb and Gwinnett counties use OS/PC; so do Ben Hill and Emanuel.

The other two widely used mechanisms are punch cards, in 18 counties including Marion, and lever systems, used in 79 counties, including Bryan and Emanuel. Two counties still use paper ballots.

(But before concluding that the lever system used in Bryan and Emanuel, with no undervotes, is superior, consider that it is also in place in Bacon County, where the undervote percentage reached 10.5 percent.)

Combs said she can only guess how Fayette's 317 undervotes occurred since no races were close, hence no ballots examined. But there are several reasons why a voter's ballot may not be recorded in a given race, she said, drawing on her experience in past elections.

"Undervotes have occurred because the voter did not vote in that race or did not fill in the oval," she said. "Some voters circled the name or put a checkmark in the oval. Some used a pen, and did not follow instructions to use only the pencil in the voting booth. But mostly, they circled the name."

Voting for more than one candidate in a single race would also result in no vote being recorded. Combs said she finds it unbelievable that voters would come to the polls, stand in line, and make their way through local elections and constitutional questions, yet intentionally skip the presidential choices, so her suspicion is that one of the other contingencies took place.

She was, however, gratified with Fayette's record, and that so few voters did "lose" their vote for president. "That says a lot for our poll workers and for the voters," who pay attention to instructions in the voting booth, she said.

Fayette precinct workers joke that they'd like to install a recording of the words they use to admonish voters as they hand them their ballots hundreds of times each Election Day: "Be sure you black in the oval, using ONLY the pencil you find in the booth, and remember to look at both sides of the ballot."