Old systems more often used in well-off U.S., Utah areas
Now a study by Brigham Young University and Brown University appears to prove Gore really was wrong — about voting machines.
At a November press conference during the disputed 2000 presidential election skirmish, Gore said, "One thing to remember is that the old and cheap, outdated machinery is usually found in areas with populations that are of lower income, minorities, seniors on fixed income."
That opinion is resurfacing as the nation braces for what could be another legally contested presidential election, but the new study contradicts the notion that America's poor might be disenfranchised by ramshackle voting machines.
Utah and Ohio are the only states where the majority of voters still will be using punch cards in the 2004 presidential election, according to electionline.org, raising concerns one might become the new Florida.
Ohio is the more likely battleground as a swing state, while Utah is overwhelmingly Republican — and has never had a scad of bad chads.
It isn't unusual that well-to-do voters in Salt Lake, Utah and Summit counties still use punch machines, according to BYU economics professor Phillip Garner and Brown University's Enrico Spolaore.
Their research, published in the journal "Public Choice," found that older voting equipment is used more often in counties with populations that are more wealthy than the national average.
Additionally, the professors found that punch-card machines are more prevalent in counties with smaller percentages of minorities and seniors.
"The conventional wisdom, at least on the national average, is that these old machines were concentrated in poor areas with many seniors on fixed incomes and many minorities," Garner said. "It turns out to be the opposite."
What's going on here?
Garner and Spolaore discovered that richer counties upgraded voting technology 30 or 40 years ago. Poorer counties held on to old-fashioned paper ballots until more recently. When they did upgrade, they leapfrogged the technology adopted by the richer counties.
The phenomenon is similar to the way many developing countries are skipping the installation of telephone lines and leapfrogging directly to cell phone usage, Garner said. Richer nations continue to rely on a national network of phone lines, giving way to cell phones more slowly.
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