Ohio really is the new Florida.

If you are a member of the press, and want to get in touch with me for high-resolution images or questions, please e-mail me at aarong@thinkcomputer.com.

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This is why I've bothered to write all of this: attention, bloggers! Some of you have it wrong. The problem does not necessarily favor John Kerry, as some of you have written. Why? Because I only took pictures of my ballot. I confirmed with other friends from other parts of Cuyahoga County that this affects all of them, but as it turns out, the ballot's order is randomized by precinct. There are 22 ballot configurations, so depending on how they were randomized, this problem might actually favor George W. Bush. There's really no way to tell.

Problem Summary

• Cuyahoga County is the most populous county in Ohio. It is also a Democratic stronghold, since it includes Cleveland. Ohio has 20 electoral votes. Anything that happens in Cuyahoga County affects the entire nation.
• There is no way to know if people who have already sent in their ballots voted by position or by number. This means that the issue here is worse than the 2000 Florida debacle, because there is no way to discern voter intent, "hanging chads" or not.
• Each ballot may be messed up differently. There are 22 possible layouts according to the Board of Elections.
• People may be less inclined to vote simply because of the confusion. I certainly was.
• The advice given to me by the Cuyahoga County hotline staffer turned out to be exactly incorrect. She should have said "keep the card in the same place, but ignore the arrows. By just saying, "keep the card in the same place," she was implying that I should vote by position on the ballot, instead of by number. You are supposed to vote by number.
• Nowhere in the directions does it say to ignore the arrows.
• The fact that some, but not all, numbers line up implies that they are supposed to, despite the fact that the Secretary of State claims they are not supposed to.
• Cuyahoga County is apparently the only state that puts numbers out of sequence when using punch cards. To back up this claim, I present the following counterexamples:
  • Florida 2000 - http://danbricklin.com/log/sampleballot.htm
  • West Virginia 2004 - http://www.wvsos.org/elections/ballots/general04/genkan30stalbans.pdf
  • West Virginia 2004 - http://www.wvsos.org/elections/ballots/general04/genkan30.pdf
  • West Virginia 2004 - http://www.wvsos.org/elections/ballots/general04/genkan31.pdf
  • West Virginia 2004 - http://www.wvsos.org/elections/ballots/general04/genkan32.pdf
  • North Carolina 2004 - http://www.co.forsyth.nc.us/elections/041102/041102GenElecSampleBallot.pdf
• The Associated Press reporter I spoke with said that the exact same ballot booklets would be used on November 2nd for the butterfly ballots in voting booths in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. This would mean that people are certain to vote for the wrong person in some cases, or not have their vote counted. I asked the Director of the Board of Elections, Michael Vu, about this, when he called me Friday. He first said that the ballot booklets were the same as the ones on November 2nd. Then he said that they weren't. This is a potential problem, and probably the only flip-flop that actually matters in this election.
• The Board of Elections mentioned in the Plain Dealer that voters can request a new ballot to re-try their vote, but this only affects absentee voters. Why would people absent from the Cleveland area be reading the Cuyahoga column of the Metro section of the the Cleveland newspaper on October 20th? Answer: they wouldn't.

History of the Problem

The disclaimers: I do not work for either campaign. I do have political preferences which should be made obvious by other pages on this site, but I have done everything possible to keep them out of this issue.

Monday, October 18th, I received my absentee ballot here in Boston, since I am registered to vote in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where I am from originally. I had always seen my parents line up the arrows with the punch card in the voting booth, and I had done the same on several previous occasions voting absentee from school. This time, on my ballot, if you used the arrows that were provided to you, the numbers on the ballot and the numbers on the punch card did not line up. In some cases, they were exactly reversed.

I thought at first that it was just me. I flipped to the next page. There was no possible way to make the numbers line up here. 20 on the booklet pointed to 21 on the punch card, and 21 on the booklet pointed to 20 on the punch card. I showed some people in the office at work (where I had my ballot mailed), and they indicated that it wasn't just me.

So, I called the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections help line on the front of the booklet. The woman on the other end of the line was nice, but not helpful. I didn't quite understand the true nature of the problem, so I phrased my question regarding the presidential page only. I asked: "Are you supposed to keep the punch card in the same place when you vote, or are you supposed to move it around to line up with the arrows on the booklet?" I was referring to the fact that you could move the punch card so that it lined up with 6 and 10 for John Kerry, or 2 and 4 for the Libertarian candidate and Bush, but not both simultaneously. The BOE woman was confused, but told me to keep the punch card in the same place. She said she was trying to find her boss, but couldn't locate him. She assured me that he would call back. I doubted that he would, and I was right. He never did.

I called my parents at home in Cleveland and asked my mother what she thought I should do. She suggested calling a local official with an office in Columbus. I will not say which one, because he later informed the staffer who I was corresponding with that he wanted to stay out of it. His name was one of those on the ballot, and so he would be affected. He didn't want it to become an issue in his campaign.

The official's office was very helpful, and got in touch with a number of Ohio officials, including the Board of Elections and the office of the Secretary of State. When I tried calling the Secretary of State as a voter, they never even returned my call. Meanwhile, while their office was making calls, I tried finding a federal agency with the authority to enforce elections standards. I had no idea which agency that might be, so I searched Google, following links on federal government sites wherever I could find them. I finally found the Election Assistance Commission. I got in touch with a researcher there who informed me that despite the Florida problems in 2000, the EAC did not have any enforcement power. Furthermore, no federal agency does. It's all left up to the states. The EAC researches elections and provides advice, so she was interested from that perspective, but couldn't make anyone actually do anything.

I discussed the option of going to the press with my local official's office for some time. The Cleveland Plain Dealer was supposedly interested in the story, and finally stopped by the official's office in Columbus to see the pictures. I received a call from a Plain Dealer reporter only a couple of hours later, who identified himself as someone I had once babysat for years ago. Not only that, but he lived on my street, and had attended my alma mater at the same time as my father. I couldn't believe that the paper would assign such a biased reporter to my case. I stressed the potential national ramifications to him as something that I thought made the story extremely important. He responded by saying that the Plain Dealer would tenatively run the story on Thursday as possibly a "consumer interest" piece. I asked him to run my quotes by me before they were printed. I never heard from him again.

I asked the local official's office whether I should go to the national media myself with the story. The staff didn't want to upset the Plain Dealer by pre-empting them, because when that had happened in the past, the official had been eliminated from Cleveland press coverage for a full year. In the end, however, they agreed that it was too important, and I should take the risk because they had never promised the Plain Dealer an exclusive story, anyway, and neither had I.

I called and e-mailed every major national news outlet I could think of. I got no response from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and a number of others. By Wednesday, my grandmother, who used to work for the United Press, suggested that I call the agency that was once her biggest competitor, the Associated Press. (The United Press has been out of business for years, but she tells me that Wolf Blitzer on CNN got his start there.) The AP in Boston told me to call the AP in Cleveland, so I did. The reporter I spoke with told me she spent a day at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections researching me story, after which she told me that my story was questionable because the directions in the ballot book said to vote by number. She made it sound as if she was siding with the Board of Elections and the Secretary of State's office, which had told the local official's staff that nothing was wrong with the ballot design. I debated with her whether the directions really mattered at all, since they hadn't done much to prevent the 2000 crisis in Florida. By the end of our second phone call she was clearly angry with me, so I sent her an apologetic e-mail, since none of this was really her fault. Fortunately, even if she didn't like me anymore, she printed the story:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OHIO_VOTING?SITE=OHCOD&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Since the AP feeds to national news media, it was printed in a smattering of Ohio papers, appeared briefly on the home page of Yahoo!, and made its way back to Cleveland by Thursday, when a third Plain Dealer reporter I had never heard of printed a story without ever actually speaking to me:

http://www.cleveland.com/cuyahoga/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1098351259110130.xml

I sent the pictures to a friend of mine from school who I knew was interested in user interface issues regarding computer software. This was as big of a UI problem as anything I had ever seen. She forwarded it to the interesting-people mailing list, at which point the pictures made it into the world of blogging.

I did talk to Michael Vu at the Board of Elections about all of this, so he is aware of the issues. He told me that he could see where I was coming from. He did not say that he would do anything about it.

For anyone wondering, I have notified one friend who is strongly Democrat, and one who is strongly Republican, about the issue. I left it to them to notify the campaigns. I won't pro-actively deal with the campaigns directly, for fear of being called "biased." I am in general, but I'm not on this issue.

The most important point: the only entity with power to make a difference here is the press, which is why the next paragraph appears twice on this page.

October 29, 2004 Update

The New York Times has run an editorial about this problem, based in large part on information from this page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/opinion/29fri1.html

Thank you, New York Times!

The Ohio Rotation

Ohio state law mandates that the candidates' names must be randomized on the ballot, to the best of my knowledge. When I spoke with Michael Vu, who runs Cuyahoga County's Board of Elections, he repeatedly referred to this law as "the Ohio rotation." I found this interesting from a semantic angle because it implies that other states do not have this requirement, which would also explain why they do not have this problem. The point of the Ohio rotation is to prevent one candidate from getting more or fewer votes just because he or she is listed first or last, respectively.

The right way to go about implementing this is to pre-set 22 randomized layouts for each precinct, and then code the punch card for the appropriate layout. That way, the numbers can stay in sequential order, as they appear to in every other state in the Union that uses a punch-card system. For some reason, Ohio chose not to do this, instead relying on the intelligence of voters to discern that the arrows are meaningless, and that they should search through a grid of 228 numbers to find the right one. Mr. Vu agreed with me when I pointed out that this was not the optimal solution for low-vision voters, and I further asserted that it wasn't even optimal for me. I see 20/20 with my glasses, and I still like to rely on the arrows for help, specifically so that I don't mistakenly punch the wrong box, in effect voting for someone whose policies I might strongly disagree with.

It sounds to me like the County had plenty of time to think about this problem, and yet it took the cheaper and/or easier way out. I intend to make it as difficult for them to continue in the present manner as possible, because I want my vote to count, and I want it to count for the people I vote for, at that.

In thinking about this whole thing, what I find most ironic is that in dreaming up "the Ohio rotation," many Ohio legislators may have legislated their careers out of existence. Never did I think I'd see natural selection at work in the law.

If you are a member of the press, and want to get in touch with me for high-resolution images or questions, please e-mail me at aarong@thinkcomputer.com.