Study exposes election glitches

The first nationwide election tracking system, sponsored in part by the Fels Institute of Government at Penn, has revealed that significant failures with voter registration marred the presidential election.

The MyVote1 system ran from Philadelphia's Constitution Center throughout Election Day, and tracked voting difficulties reported by individuals across the country. Thousands of people who encountered obstacles while trying to vote phoned a toll-free number that recorded their complaint and automatically forwarded their calls to a local election officer for possible redress.

In addition to Fels, electoral reform groups and a company called VoterLink Data Systems collaborated on the program. From 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 2, graduate students from Penn and other schools received about 100,000 calls from frustrated voters.

Using the data, researchers identified the general areas of voter registration, absentee ballots and poll location information as the main problems in an electoral system that is widely administered at the county level across the country.

"In all three areas, local election boards failed," VoterLink President Ken Smuckler said. "I think what happened ... is that in battleground states, the number of organizations running absentee ballot programs [and] registration programs overwhelmed local secretaries and registration processes."

The researchers' most disturbing finding, though, was that a majority of people seeking redress were unable to reach an officer.

"Fifty-five percent of all calls on Election Day failed to connect to the election board," Fels Executive Director Chris Patusky said. "That's a terrible thing. The whole system of redress on Election Day is broken."

But the data that was collected might prove to be more useful than the Election Day support. Analysts can use the compiled information to pinpoint not only the nature of problems, but also where they are coming from. They can also illustrate electoral system failures.

Some of the swing states proved to be the most problematic. A high volume of calls came from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. But Pittsburgh and Allegheny County in Pennsylvania reported the most complaints of any location in the country.

"There was a pattern with all the hot spots -- these were places where we had heard there was partisan voting registration coming together," said Cecilia Martinez, executive director of the Reform Institute -- a Republican voting reform organization that was part of the consortium working on MyVote1.

Project directors hope that the results will help prevent the same complications from occurring in the future.

"We're going to lay this over census data -- we're going to be able to tell [if] problems [are] worse in minority neighborhoods, [and if] the system [is] worse in Republican versus Democratic neighborhoods," Patusky said. "We're going to be able to tell by states and by county. ... We'll use evidence to fix problems -- not theory, not people's opinions, not rumor."

Fels will lead the effort to circulate the results, distributing the data to other universities, hopefully creating the backbone of a reform effort. Directors expect the analysis will be finished by June, giving the government ample time to implement changes before the mid-term elections in 2006.

"I'm sure the new federal election assistant commission will look at the data," Smuckler said. "It's really the first time that any hard data has been available to pinpoint problems on Election Day."

The organizers hope to use the system again in coming elections to provide concrete data to highlight electoral system weaknesses and suggest means to solve them. Patusky noted that the simplicity of the technology meant it was somewhat expensive -- because of all of the phone banks -- but not a difficult project.

"Some people would say it's not a perfectly scientific tool, but it's light-years ahead of anything else," he said. "I think it's going to become the tool on Election Day."

And the system can easily be exported to other countries. In fact, Fels has set its sights on the upcoming elections in Iraq.

"We hope to use it in Iraq in January," Patusky said. "Journalists might give some sporadic reports, [but] with our system, you can see exactly what's happening."

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