election-law_gl-digest   Wednesday, October 3 2001   Volume 01 : Number 078




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Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 08:31:13 -0700
From: "Henry E. Brady" <hbrady@csm.berkeley.edu>
Subject: NEW STUDY OF VOTING SYSTEMS

I've included below an AP story on a new study on voting systems by me
and three colleagues that was just released.  The study, entitled
"Counting All the Votes" is available at "http://ucdata.berkeley.edu".

Henry Brady
Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Director, Survey Research Center and UC DATA


October 1, 2001

 Study of Electronic, Scan Voting

 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 Filed at 6:59 p.m. ET

A new study of the nation's voting machines concluded that new
electronic machines are as reliable as optical scan  machines,
contradicting an earlier, influential study.

The report released Monday offered no surprises by concluding that punch
card machines performed the worst of
all existing technologies. Punch card ballots were blamed for many of
the problems in Florida last year, which left the
presidential election in stalemate for more than a month.

The study at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley, was funded, in part,
by Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of
electronic voting machines. The company also manufactures punch card and
optical scan machines.

The study analyzed the results of 2,219 counties during the 2000
election.

An earlier joint study by the California Institute of Technology and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded electronic voting
machines allowed too many ballots to go uncounted -- either by voters
failing to make a choice or choosing too many candidates.

While that study said a newer generation of electronic machines offered
great promise for improvement, it said optical scan machines were the
most reliable of current technology.  It recommended widespread upgrades
to optical scans.

 The new study, however, said electronic and optical scan machines
performed better than other technologies overall. It
 found, however, that optical scan machines had more instances of ``very
poor performance''

 It concluded that more study is needed of all technologies before any
conclusions can be drawn.

 ^------

 On the Web:
 http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/

  Copyright 2001 The Associated
   Press | Privacy Information

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End of election-law_gl-digest V1 #78
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