http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apelection_story.asp?category=1130&slug=Election%20ChangesImprovements to voting machines and election administration saved a million votes that otherwise would likely have gone uncounted in the 2004 elections, with states and counties that made the most comprehensive upgrades recovering the most votes, a new academic analysis says.
The report released Monday by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project looked at a key measure of election integrity - residual votes, or ballots cast during an election on which voters failed to mark a choice or machines did not record it.
The report "provides some corrective to what's getting to be a common interpretation of this election, which is that the election was deeply flawed and things were worse in 2004 than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, the report's author and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor.
The report acknowledges that other factors may influence the number of residual votes, including the presidential candidates and how energized the electorate may be, along with the awareness among election officials that they were under scrutiny.