Prof. Charles Stewart, III
Political Science
MIT

"The Long Strange Trip of Election Reform: Why 2004 won't be much different from 2000"

Abstract

Any close observer of the chaos resulting from the 2000 presidential election controversy in Florida would have predicted that by 2004 the nation's voting technology problems would have been put to rest. In fact, on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, the voting technology problems that were unearthed in 2000 are still largely unresolved. This talk assesses why this is. The questions I will address include the following: (1) Why do Americans use machines to vote whereas almost no other country does? (2) What do we know about the performance of voting machines? (3) Viewed as a system, how do votes lost due to voting machine malfunctions compare to votes lost due to other problems, like voter registration problems? (4) Why has the election reform path steered away from addressing the problems that were identified in 2000? (5) What barriers stand in the way of making progress on the known problems associated with voting technologies?