WNT: Explaining the Undervotes

W A S H I N G T O N, Nov. 30 -- Election officials in Florida’s Miami-Dade County packed up their ballots in boxes for transport to Tallahassee, where Judge N. Sanders Sauls will decide whether they should be examined and counted.

Within the boxes are many incomplete ballots that election officials call “undervotes” — punch-card ballots with no holes or holes only slightly indented. Vice President Al Gore hopes that there are enough votes to help him pull ahead of Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the state’s presidential vote tally.

“These are real votes,” argues Gore attorney David Boies. “They just haven’t been counted because of the limitations of the punch-card ballot system.”

Undervote Can Be Intentional

Nationwide, there were about 2.1 million to 2.8 million undervotes in this election. Sometimes, though, the undervoting is intentional.

“The vast majority of undervotes are voters basically expressing their desire not to vote for any of the candidates offered for a particular office,” says ABCNEWS election law consultant Jan Baran.

But some Florida precincts show a much higher number of ballots than usual that are not punched through. In several low-income Miami-Dade precincts, they comprised up to 5 percent of all the ballots.

“These types of elections tend to increase turnouts, and I find it odd that this many people would go out and intentionally not vote,” says Kerry Haynie, assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Haynie contends the voting equipment may be more to blame than the voter. The rate of undervoting is much higher in counties that use the punch-card voting system.

“What we may be seeing is this emerging digital divide now showing up in the electoral process, where you have this gap between some kind of precincts and voting equipment,” says Haynie. “So we may be seeing this digital divide. Rather than something wrong with the individual voter, it’s perhaps the equipment.”