Why has counting ballots become more difficult instead of easier?

Columns

June 4, 2009

By Will Sullivan Picayune Item Thu Jun 04, 2009, 09:09 AM CDT

The first vote I ever cast was in 1965 and I cast it on a mechanical voting machine in Natchez where I grew up.

Less than an hour after the polls closed, we knew that a liquor referendum had passed. Natchez had been one of the “open cities” in Mississippi where liquor sales were in openly advertised liquor stores and gambling had long flourished even when both were supposedly illegal everywhere in Mississippi, so the results weren’t a surprise, neither was the quickness with which the results were reported, for the supervisors in Adams County had long before that day decided to move from paper ballots to mechanical voting machines and spent the money to make it happen.

I became accustomed, when I was growing up, to knowing the local results of elections very quickly after the polls closed and wondered why vote counting took so long everywhere else. I asked my Dad and he told me about the voting machines and I accompanied him and Mom and my grandmother to the polls quite often as a child and watched them cast their ballots. I suppose that is why I am so adamant about voting even to this day.

I’m also adamant about quick vote counts but since I moved from Natchez, that hasn’t happened. When Genie and I moved to Jackson after we married, that city had the punch cards that became famous during the Bush-Gore presidential election for the “hanging chads.” Punch cards were used in the big elections and paper ballots for smaller ones at that time in Jackson. As a newspaperman in Jackson, I found out all about hanging chads way back then. I also discovered that using those cards and paper ballots made for vote counting at a snail’s pace. The cards were somewhat faster than the paper ballots but did not give results nearly as rapidly as did the mechanical machines on which I cast my first ballot. Jackson would later adopt the mechanical voting machines and the pace of getting election results picked up considerably. Because of the size of the population of the city and county in which Jackson is located the results were not available as quickly as those in Natchez but much more quickly than they were in cities and counties of any size that did not have the mechanical voting machines.

For some reason the mechanical voting machines first introduced in this country in the 1890s, never became widely adopted except in larger cities, which Natchez was not, though Adams County apparently had far-seeing supervisors with big city aspirations. Expense was often given as the excuse for not adopting the mechanical machines. Officials seeking quicker vote counts bought into the claims of slick salesmen for punch card and optical reader systems to speed up vote counting. Faster snails were in the race but they were still snails and often made mistakes.

I have had a case of deja vous during the recent municipal elections. Part of the deja vous was nostalgia for the old mechanical machines that were so efficient and part of it was of memories of the first election night I spent in Jackson watching ballots being counted. At that time Jackson was using the punch cards and I became familiar with hanging chads because they were causing punch cards to hang up in the machines counting the ballots and stopping the machines. That was a long night and only the first of many long election nights until Hinds County and Jackson bought the mechanical voting machines.

No, Picayune didn’t use punch cards in this election but it did use optical scanners and, at least during the first primary, they kept jamming in the readers. Pearl River County has these new computer-based voting machines but Picayune opted not to use them because election officials didn’t want to have to travel to Poplarville to count the votes. Picayune’s choice probably didn’t slow the vote count too much, after all Poplarville used the computer-based machines and that city wasn’t too far ahead of Picayune in getting results. I’m not sure what voting methods were used in other coastal cities with municipal elections this year but every city but Waveland was ahead of both Poplarville and Picayune in getting results Tuesday night.

I have read where the mechanical voting machines are no longer manufactured and I find that sad. They were more efficient than anything now in use, in my opinion. Not even these new computer-based voting machines give results as quickly and they are far more prone to error as are all electronics — how often has your computer crashed or had some glitch that jumbled words and letters, etc. — when compared to mechanical devices that depend on gears.

With the demise of the mechanical voting machines, I’m not sure what we can do to bring efficiency and accuracy to vote counting. Maybe we just need to bring the machines back and go back to an easy to understand voting system that produces accurate results quickly when the voting is over.

Text Only

Columns

Health Care fund may hit zero
A new Republican governor and new Republican legislative leadership now face the same task that has confounded their Democratic colleagues when they had the reins of state government — finding a way to pay for Mississippi’s massive Medicaid program.

February 8, 2012
Komen backlash wrongheaded
To hear much of the American media tell it, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the breast-cancer charity that recently cut its ties with Planned Parenthood before (sort of) backing down, should simply be no more.

February 8, 2012
Voting rights attack is un-American
When this country was founded, only white men owning property could vote. Since then, the franchise has gradually expanded to include blacks and women, the poor and the young. Poll taxes and literacy tests have been abolished. A firm national principle has been established: Every vote should count, and count equally. Until now.

February 7, 2012
Size of Universe is unimaginable
I stumbled across an interesting video on YouTube produced by Tony Darnell, entitled "The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Picture Ever Taken." It is, to say the least, a very thought-provoking video and has to do with our place in the Universe.

February 7, 2012
Numbers suggest priorities
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
As the new Republican majority controlling state government claimed victory by passing the Children’s Protection Act with ease in the House, it’s clear that even more fundamental — and more politically difficult — challenges loom down the public policy road.

February 4, 2012
Romney has Massachusetts problem
By Byron York/Syndicated columnist
Mitt Romney was born and raised in Michigan and has ties to Utah. Yet he chose to make his career, both in business and politics, in Massachusetts. Nearly every political problem Romney has today, at least those involving his policy positions, stems from that one decision.

February 4, 2012
Woman escaped killing machine
By Nat Hentoff/Syndicated columnist
A survivor of Robert Mugabe’s relentlessly brutal dictatorship in Zimbabwe, Patience Mhlanga would like you to know what it was like to grow up in grinding fear there. She escaped, but her story tells what so many others are still undergoing in that hellhole that the rest of the world allows to continue:
“Growing up in Zimbabwe, I learned the meaning of persecution early. My father was a strong supporter of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and the supporters of Robert Mugabe threatened to kill our family for my father’s views.

February 3, 2012
Restored restaurant signals renewal
By Bill Crawford/Meridian Star columnist
Choctaw tribal chief Phyliss Anderson restored and reopened Phillip M’s at the Pearl River Resort last week. She also signaled her intent to renew the economic policies so successfully implemented by the restaurant’s namesake.

February 3, 2012
Woman escaped killing machine
A survivor of Robert Mugabe’s relentlessly brutal dictatorship in Zimbabwe, Patience Mhlanga would like you to know what it was like to grow up in grinding fear there. She escaped, but her story tells what so many others are still undergoing in that hellhole that the rest of the world allows to continue:

February 3, 2012
Restored restaurant signals renewal
Choctaw tribal chief Phyliss Anderson restored and reopened Phillip M’s at the Pearl River Resort last week. She also signaled her intent to renew the economic policies so successfully implemented by the restaurant’s namesake.

February 3, 2012
More Columns Headlines

Columns

Search Results

Why has counting ballots become more difficult instead of easier?

Site Map

Contact Us