Tuesday, November 5, 2002

Researchers From Caltech and MIT Track Improvements to Voting Process in Wake of Florida's Problems By FLORENCE OLSEN During Florida's ballot crisis in 2000, two prominent research universities offered to help repair the nation's voting process so that Americans would not have to go through another voting fiasco requiring the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court. As voters go to the polls today, researchers at the two institutions will be closely watching the changes that have been made to voting practices so far. But the researchers say they will also be looking ahead to the next big thing: online voting. In the two years since the Florida debacle, political scientists at the two universities -- the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- have gathered and analyzed millions of election records, most recently in Florida's 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary. And some of their recommendations have been incorporated into a new federal law aimed at making elections run more smoothly for everyone. In this year's Florida primary, the researchers, working together in the Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology Project, found that the state had a substantially lower number of problem ballots after replacing its old punch-card systems with new systems for casting and counting ballots. Comparing the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial-primary returns from the seven largest counties in Florida with ballots cast in those counties in the past three gubernatorial general elections, the researchers reported a 35 percent drop, from 3.1 percent to 2 percent, in the number of ballots that were spoiled, uncounted, or unmarked. The Caltech-MIT team cites the numbers as evidence that better-designed equipment improves voting accuracy. But as shifts to new voting systems take place in other counties and states during the next couple of election cycles, the researchers say they will be looking into another election problem: the recruiting of poll workers. Because of older poll workers' inexperience with the computerized voting systems used in Florida's recent primary, many election administrators are rightly worried that the systems will exacerbate the problem they already have with recruiting election-day workers, says Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of political science at MIT. The typical poll worker is about 70. Many of them are intimidated by computers, he says, "so they just give up." Some members of the Caltech-MIT team think that getting high-school and college students involved as poll workers could help solve the problem. The election researchers applaud the Help America Vote Act of 2002 for requiring that a new Election Assistance Commission set up a program for college students to serve as poll workers. "By bringing them into the process like this and getting them engaged in politics and how it works, we hope it's going to have a huge, long-term impact on re-engaging them in the process," says R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at Caltech. However, money may be the most significant aspect of the Help America Vote Act, which President Bush signed on October 29, says Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa. The new law authorizes spending $3.86-billion on election administration during the next four years. That comes to about $4,000 per precinct, says Mr. Jones, who is chairman of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems. Currently, the total of counties' annual spending on election administration is about $1-billion, according to survey data collected by the Caltech-MIT research team. If Congress appropriates the $3.86-billion, it would be a significant incentive for counties to make improvements in their voting equipment, and in their registration and communications systems, says Mr. Ansolabehere. One of the original purposes of the Caltech-MIT project had been to produce a voting machine that would be reliable, affordable, and easy to use. But that program was put on hold while researchers studied other aspects of election administration. Current voting systems still fall short, says Mr. Ansolabehere, despite recent improvements offered by voting-equipment manufacturers. "Existing equipment can be improved on, and we and some others are pitching in to help on that," he says. Mr. Jones, at the University of Iowa, says that fewer than a dozen companies are manufacturing voting systems. "But it's enough so that innovation is ticking along," he says. "Right now, it's a very competitive market." According to Mr. Ansolabehere, the innovations are sufficient that the Caltech-MIT researchers plan on "switching gears a bit," so that they can focus on the next big thing: Internet voting. Mr. Ansolabehere says that a number of trends point to a future defined by Internet voting. The Defense Department is expanding its efforts to let military employees use the Internet to cast absentee ballots. Voters' demand for convenience is driving counties and states to weigh Internet voting as an alternative to current practice. And overseas, countries such as Britain and Switzerland have embraced the idea of having their citizens vote on the Internet. "The cat is out of the bag on Internet voting," says Mr. Ansolabehere, "and so we see the main technological challenge of the future is to try to develop secure Internet voting." The Caltech-MIT project has been financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The new federal law, which takes effect in December, authorizes more than $20-million for new research on voting-systems and includes many of the recommendations of election researchers at Caltech and MIT, as well as suggestions by other voting experts. The project's greatest contribution to the public debate over election reform may be its national collection and analysis of data on the cost to counties of running elections, says Mr. Ansolabehere. Those data showed that the states needed federal dollars to pay for election-administration improvements and to replace punch-card and lever-type voting machines. As citizens cast their votes in the midterm elections, the Caltech and MIT researchers say they will be closely watching the results in Georgia, where 19,000 new touch-screen voting systems have replaced all of the voting equipment used in the 2000 general election. "Any time you're working with people and high technology," says Mr. Alvarez, "there's always that chance that there will be systems failures, and we want to study those as closely as we can." Background articles from The Chronicle: MIT and Caltech Researchers Propose Shifts in Voting Technology (8/3/2001) Universities Could Benefit From Increase in Voting-Technology Research (5/23/2001) Computer Scientists and Political Scientists Seek to Create a Fiasco-Free Election Day (4/20/2001) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

French TV stars rock the world of theoretical physics Point Park College investigates unauthorized changes in student grades India's Supreme Court upholds use of quotas by minority colleges, but gives states some oversight powers 4 institutions announce major library acquisitions Researchers from Caltech and MIT track improvements to voting process in wake of Florida's problems