Will your vote count?

LIMA - In 2000, it was Florida and the drawn-out battle over bad ballots and hanging chads. By 2004, it was Ohio's turn in the national spotlight with long voting lines and disputed provisional ballots. Since then, legislators, party leaders and state elections leaders have continued to battle over what constitutes a fair election.

Given all that, it's fair to ask the question; will your vote count?

A 2006 Zogby poll indicated 92 percent of Americans are worried about votes being counted in secret. In an Associate Press poll taken just weeks before the 2006 election, people in the United States shared space with Italy and Mexico as having the lowest levels of confidence in the vote count. Fewer than two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the vote count would be accurate.

Despite those fears, most elections officials and the majority of the academic and nonprofit leaders who watch elections will tell you your vote will count. There are problems with machines, with people and, perhaps most of all, with the political system that oversees it all, but, when it comes down to it, the system still works.

"I think there's always the potential for problems to occur and most election officials expect some problems to occur," said Robert Alexander, associate professor of political science at Ohio Northern University. "But I expect my vote to count. I'm not that worried."

Problems past and present

There are plenty of people out there who will tell you the electoral process is a sham. Complaints are as old as elections themselves, but seem to have increased in the past decade. In 2000, the wafer-thin Bush victory and chaos centering around Florida prompted charges of everything from voter fraud to intimidation. Four years later, the presidential race was close once again - and, once again, concerns arose. Some said the entire system was crooked. Others said everything was working perfectly. People who knew the system found the truth somewhere in the middle.

"We earned the 2000 problems. What was exposed in 2000 was certainly nothing that surprised elections officials," Allen County Elections Director Keith Cunningham said. "The infrastructure that was in place was certainly not sufficient to handle the situation. We went years without sufficiently investing in the system and we ended with problems."

Like many elections officials, Cunningham saw a potential for trouble long before the rest of the world noticed. Faulty machines, unprepared voters and a steady flow of inconsistent information fed to elections officials long had been problems. But it was when the vote got close that every really took notice.

"You have voter error, technology error, election official error. They all compound and sometimes the system's ability to measure that finitely is just not there," Cunningham said.

"Due to the closeness of the elections, it matters," Alexander added, "If we win by 75 electoral votes, it doesn't really matter that much, but when it comes down to a few precincts, it matters."

All that attention has brought about reforms. After the 2000 elections, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act and set aside more than $3 billion to cover the cost of new voting machines. Since then, laws have been passed at the federal and state levels designed to increase voter participation and make the process more transparent. As nice as that sounds, much of the money was spent on machines that hadn't been researched, and more than a few of those new laws have created new headaches for voters and officials.

"Frankly, it was a hasty investment. It did improve the structure, but it caused new problems, too," Cunningham said.

The machines

There's no question technology has changed elections. In most cases, it's changed them for the better. New technologies help simplify the voting process, speed up counts and make it easier for elections boards to manage voter registrations and absentee ballots.

In recent decades, Ohio voters have moved from hand-counted ballots to optical scan machines that allow the voter to mark a ballot that is then read by machine. Part of that $3 billion investment after the 2000 election kicked off the move to new electronic, touch-screen machines. As the name implies, they allow voters to cast their choice with a simple touch of the screen. The computer does the rest.

As simple as that sounds, some elections officials fear the rush to embrace new tools before they're perfected may end in problems.

As recently as last November, Putnam County found itself at the center of its own vote-count controversy. The trouble started with the August flood that destroyed nearly all of the county's voting machines. Then, on election night, some of the electronic machines brought in to replace them were shut down by a glitch. Later, elections workers were accused of failing to follow advice from state election officials. In the end, the county's results did not come in until the next morning, long after the polls had closed.

The county since has purchased all new optical scan machines and expect no problems this year, according to Ginger Price, director of the Putnam County Board of Elections.

"It's all worked out very well. We're now completely optical scan. The new machines arrived, everything tested perfectly and we anticipate no problems this year," Price said.

Still, the experience was enough to leave doubts about the dependability of the electronic machines.

"I'm leery of electronic voting machines because of what we experienced. That was just something you could not predict. We prepared for that election. We checked and rechecked those machines and we could not foresee what happened. That remains in the back of my mind all the time," Price said.

Price is not alone. While Cunningham said he likes the idea of electronic voting, the current round of machines has been problematic and government oversight has been lacking.

"There were no standards really around the manufacturing of these things. It's only been in the last two years that there's been any national standard in the manufacturing of voting machines. That's not good," Cunningham said.

A series of voting irregularities in several major Ohio counties that use electronic voting systems led Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to order that a paper ballot be provided to any voter who requested one during the March primary. Earlier this year, she released the results of a $1.9 million federally funded study that indicated touch-screen voting machines are vulnerable to fraud. According to the study, a person with a magnet and a Blackberry could potentially change the count.

Brunner called for the replacement of all of the state's electronic voting systems - used in 53 of Ohio's 88 counties - with paper ballots and optical scan technology before the November election. Allen County and all the other counties in the Lima region currently use optical scan machines that read and record paper ballots. But, when Price sold off the last of Putnam County's electronic machines, they went to Union County.

"Brunner has talked a lot about making the whole process easier and more transparent for folks. I don't know if that will be the case," Alexander said.

The people

It's easy enough to blame the machines - and most admit they have been a problem in recent years - but the biggest part of the voting equation is wholly human.

If the November election pulls in the 80 percent experts predict, that would mean 160 million voters. They will be directed by about 8,000 elections administrators, tens of thousands of employees and 1 million poll workers. That's a lot of humans, and a lot of chances for human error.

"This is a human endeavor. The machine plays a very minor part in it," Cunningham said. "That's just a massive human effort. To think that you can take on something involving that many humans and you're not going to see some human error, it's folly."

Beyond simple human error, there are also the people purposefully meddling with the system to try to manage the outcome. Both political parties have been guilty in recent years of pushing through election laws they believe help their side. For Democrats, that includes laws that make it easier for students and minorities to vote. For Republicans, it's efforts to question voter registrations from areas that tend to vote for their opposition.

Those efforts have led to a cynicism among voters and an increased suspicion of the role of politics in elections, even at the local level where elections boards and staffs are made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans appointed by their respective parties.

To Cunningham, that balance, married with security precautions and the seriousness with which they approach their jobs, makes the suspicion unfounded.

"This is a political arena. We are all here by political appointment. When I first started, I was more political that I am now. A clerk told me, ‘You're going to find you don't care who wins as long as you get the vote counted right.' That's pretty much where we stand," Cunningham said.

The human most likely to throw off the vote is the voter himself. Failing to register, getting information wrong on the forms or just marking the ballot wrong is the surest way to make sure your vote doesn't count.

"Most votes that aren't counted generally go back to something the voter has or hasn't done," Cunningham said. "The biggest thing you can do to make sure your vote counts is to make sure your voter registration is current and up to date."

Of course, no single issue cancels as many votes as apathy. Refusing to register or walking away from the polls because of long lines means you are passing on one of your primary rights.

"I've seen people willing to stand in line for pancakes longer than they are willing to stand in line to vote. That's kind of ridiculous," Cunningham said.

At it's core, all the talk of miscounted votes and rigged elections may contribute to that apathy, Alexander said. That danger is more real than any missing registration of faulty machine.

"What I'm concerned about is that, for a lot of folks, deciding to vote in itself is such a marginal choice. I would hate if, because of voter fraud, they decide not to vote at all," Alexander said.