Counting votes that don't count

Last Tuesday saw a lot of voting problems.

News coverage of the poll problems mostly implied that the problems were minimal, brushing them aside with trivializing labels. The Associated Press, for example, declared in a headline that "Voting System Worked, With Some Hiccups." The New York Times agreed, declaring on its masthead that "Polling Places Report Snags, but Not Chaos." A Washington Post story's lede discussed the day's voting "glitches."

Were these poll problems merely hiccups, snags or glitches? That depends where you live and where you voted. If you did.

Sarasota witnessed the latest in Florida's recently established tradition of screwing up elections and screwing over voters. In the election for House District 13, Katherine Harris' (R-Fla.) seat, the Republican candidate claimed a 368-vote victory over his Democratic opponent. That's a margin of less than two-tenths of one percent of the 237,000 ballots cast. But of those 237,000 electronic ballots cast, as many as 18,000 votes were somehow "lost" in the Congressional race. I say they were "lost" because on those thousands of electronic ballots, citizens voted for governor, senator and much more obscure positions like the hospital board representative. But their choices in the House race were absent. It's unclear whether 18,000 ballots didn't include the House candidates, or if the Diebold AccuVote machines deleted 18,000 House votes.

There is no doubt in my mind that there should be a thorough investigation into this and perhaps even a re-vote if the 18,000 missing votes are not recovered. But what about other "glitches" around the country where the number of "lost" ballots was far less than the margin of victory? In other words, what about polling places that disenfranchised voters but didn't affect the outcome of elections?

In plenty of polls around the country, voting machines broke down or voters were given incorrect ballots (the latter case also in Florida). In many parts of Denver, for example, problems with voting machines and the computers containing the database of registered voters kept voters waiting two to three hours long. A Denver District Court judge denied an emergency request (from the Democratic Party) to extend voting by two hours to compensate for the long waits.

In places like Missouri, overzealous poll workers were wrongly requiring unnecessary forms of identification before allowing people to vote. In New Mexico, a precinct received 150 ballots when they'd requested 1,500. And the list goes on and on. In most of these races, recounts, re-votes and extended poll hours likely won't change the elections' outcomes.

Now, there are a number of possible reasons why voter turnout is low in the United States: uncompetitive races, voter fatigue from frequent elections, apathy, contentment with the present state of affairs, disenchantment with all the candidates, etc. My thesis research thus far has given me a slightly different perspective.

In my research into voter mobilization and the marketing of voting, I've seen what looks like a trend away from presenting voting as a public, civic, selfless duty to presenting voting as a personal, expressive, selfish achievement. The book "Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women," for example, argues that the 19th century's women's suffrage movement stressed that women should vote because they can make informed consumer decisions that are good for their country. Today's Rock the Vote campaign and other voter mobilization efforts, by contrast, emphasize that a citizen should vote to promote his own self-interest and make sure his "voice" will be "heard."

Given this understanding of voting as a way that individuals can be "heard," voters need to have faith that someone is indeed listening. People need to believe that their votes count for something, even if they won't tip the balance. Continuing to tally votes even after a race's winner is evident is a symbolic act that expresses our country's esteem for every voter's "voice."

Even in places where the margin between the winner and the loser was high, if there were human or machine failures that left significant numbers of votes uncounted, we have a duty to infuse voters with confidence that their votes will be counted, that their voices will be heard. Even if there is no chance that the outcome of a race will be reversed, acknowledging each and every voter's right to vote by keeping polls open later or holding re-votes in the cases of enormous tally failures can sustain citizens' faith in the system. Otherwise, dismissing the disenfranchisement of even a single voter as a "hiccup" may have devastating longterm effects on citizens' confidence in voting. Catherine Rampell '07 is an anthropology major from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.