The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

Local News

December 19, 2008

Was your vote counted this year? Most likely

By Matt Snyder

MERCER COUNTY — After a rocky presidential election year in 2004 that stripped many Mercer Countians of their presidential vote, 2008 may have seen every presidential vote tallied and counted.

County elections chief Jeff Greenburg said he has no doubt in his mind that anyone who voted on the county’s electronic machines for president this year had their ballot counted.

“All our audits show that everything was recorded accurately,” he said.

In 2004, the countywide undervote — a measure of the number of ballots that were cast which did not include any vote for a president — was a massive 7.29 percent, said Dr. Michael Coulter, a political science professor at Grove City College.

The undervote of 2004 was the result of a coding error in 13 precincts and possible machine error with the UniLect Patriot electronic voting machines that were decertified by the state in April 2005, following on the heels of the elections debacle.

But this year, the total undervote was 1.4 percent of the almost 55,000 voters. A total of 770 people who cast ballots did not choose a candidate for president or write in a name.

Coulter said undervotes average about 2 to 3 percent.

“Voters went in, were able to vote, and have their votes recorded,” Coulter said. “It’s an indication that something’s working well.”

The 2004 coding error in the 13 Mercer County precincts in the 4th congressional district led to erratic and high undervotes. Some of those precincts started using paper ballots right away, while others didn’t notice the problem until the end of voting, Coulter said. That’s why the undervote in those precincts range from slightly higher than average to 70 percent.

Even ignoring the coding error, the number of people who didn’t get a vote for president recorded was unusually high across the county.

Coulter said whereas in 2004 the undervote in precincts without the coding error were 4, 5 or 6 percent, the 2008 undervote was consistently in the 1 to 2 percent range, with some precincts only a fraction of a percent.

In Farrell’s 1-1 precinct, the 2004 undervote was 70.03 percent. In 2008, it was 3.83 percent. Likewise, Grove City 4 saw the number of undervotes shrink from 8.03 percent to 0.47 percent, Hermitage NW-3 from 5.93 to 2.31 percent, Mercer South from 4.36 to 0.93 percent, Sharon 3-1 from 20.59 to 1.27 percent, and Shenango East from 13.49 to 1.25 percent.

“The number itself reaffirms that most people, an overwhelming amount of people in the county, are not having problems or having any issues with this voting system,” Greenburg said.

Greenburg said it’s probably a familiarity issue. Voters have now been using touchscreen machines since 2001, discounting one year when the county went to optical ballots because of UniLect’s decertification.

While he said it’s probably not what produced the vast improvement in the undervote, Greenburg said the elections office this year reached out to the public. Voting machines were taken to Shenango Valley Mall, nursing homes, and private events hosted by either political party.

The county’s current voting machines, the ES&S; iVotronic touch screens, were given a black eye by an Ohio report that found a host of possible security errors riddling the systems in December 2007.

The Pennsylvania Department of State in April this year, though, ruled the security problems found by the report were highly technical and not a danger under real world conditions.

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