In the November 2000 election millions of people in the country voted without having a choice for president counted.  Some people didn’t vote for president (an intentional undervote),  some did not have their choice counted (an unintentional undervote), and some voted for more than one candidate (an overvote).  Estimates vary on the number of voter choices not counted, but all were in agreement that too many votes went uncounted.  The reasons for this problem included poor equipment, poor administration, poor ballot design, and voter error.  In 2001, researchers at MIT and CalTech coined the term residual vote to describe the sum of the under and over votes in any given race.

Most people consider all overvotes to be unintentional, although I imagine there is an extremely small percentage of the population who casts an overvote as a symbolic gesture.  The percentage of undervotes that are unintentional is certainly up to debate, although everyone wants to eliminate or reduce the chances of unintentional undervotes.

After the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act.  That law required states to take steps to reduce voter errors.  Two options were given to the states.  One was to purchase equipment that notifies voters of errors on their ballot prior to the casting of their vote.  The other was to engage in voter education campaigns that provide voters with information about how to vote and how to correct errors in their ballot.  Most voters in America operate under the first option and are using equipment that notifies them when they cast too many votes.  As I noted in an earlier post, only New York has a statutory provision similar to the Illinois provision of notifying voters of undervotes.

Because new election equipment has changed the dynamics of casting a vote, a one size fits all analysis of residual votes just isn’t sound.  In her book, the Democracy Index, Heather Gerken applauds the residual vote rate for its “elegant simplicity”.  This is a simplistic appraisal that I don’t think can be supported in the post punch card era.  Thereafter she states “we’d expect the number of people who don’t vote for a presidential candidate to be roughly constant.”  Our research in Champaign County and my intuition from decades of political activity suggest the opposite.  For example, to learn that the undervote for Governor in 2006 in Champaign County was highest in Penfield makes perfect sense based on the demographics in that precinct.  In examining the ballots it is apparent that the undervotes for the Governor’s race were generally Democrats who voted for their party candidates down the ticket, but
refused to cast a vote for the Democratic Governor who was later to be indicted and impeached.  Under the “roughly constant” standard set out in the Democracy Index, we’d be examining our voter education efforts in Penfield and examining the equipment.
So does the residual vote rate have any value?  I believe it does, but its value is far less than it was in examining a punch card system.

For optical scan systems, the value is minimal.  There is scant evidence that a voter looking at a typical optical scan ballot will have difficulty in determining what races he or she is to vote on.

In fact, relying too much on the residual vote rate may mask real problems or at the very least, give election officials a crutch to avoid positive changes.  For example, in the Better Ballots analysis from the Brennan Center, they make the argument that Douglas County, Illinois’s optical scan ballots are better than Franklin County, Illinois’s optical scan ballots based on the residual vote rates for the Attorney General and Secretary of State races in 2002.  Those rates were 3.6% vs. 3.1% for the Attorney General race and 4.0% vs. 3.0% for the Secretary of State race.  In Champaign County, our residual vote for the Secretary of State race was just 2.6% using punch card.  Would the suggestion then be that punch cards are better than optical scan ballots?  As proud as I am of the work of our office in getting reliable, accurate, and complete counts of punch card ballots, even I wouldn’t suggest that.  Clearly other factors lead to the differences in residual vote rates and the rates themselves are of more interest to political scientists analyzing voting trends than to election administrators analyzing the efficacy of their equipment and ballot design.

Of course, as I noted in another post, we have incorporated many of the Better Ballot recommendations in our ballot design, not because our residual vote numbers were too high, but because our experience and intuition convinced us that the changes were positive.   Similarly, we have incorporated changes in our ballots based on voter suggestions and complaints.  Even with an excellent residual vote rate in the last election of under .5% for President, we have at least one change we are planning to incorporate for the ballots next year.

I am less familiar with touch screen systems.  My impression is that the residual vote rates here also have less value than might be implied in some of the research.  The “roughly constant” standard is just not valid in any jurisdiction.  At the same time, Better Ballots points out common sense changes that intuitively look positive and which probably need to be implemented.  Additionally, if residual vote rates can demonstrate that machines are not properly calibrated, that would be good.

Finally, for jurisdictions that rely on voter education for reducing voter errors, the residual vote rates probably need further examination.  Many of these jurisdictions are using hand counted paper ballots where they can ascertain voter intent, or they have optical scan ballots and actually have mandatory hand counts of ballots that are under or over voted.  Whether residual vote rates are of value to those jurisdictions I’ll leave to people with more experience.

The residual vote rate was a wonderful tool to point out the flaws of outdated election equipment and the need to have ballots that are clear and understandable.  But its purpose has largely been served and using it to analyze the work of election officials is unfair and unsound.

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