Enlarge By Whitney Curtis, for USA TODAY From left to right, Charlotte Cribbs, Derek West and Beth Osiek attend the assistant supervisor training Oct. 6 at the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners Office in Maplewood, Mo. EQUIPMENT CHANGES EQUIPMENT CHANGES INTERACTIVE INTERACTIVE Gallery Track House, Senate and governor races in your state. See USA TODAY projections for which party will win which seats in November. WATCH NOW WATCH NOW Catch up with the latest Beltway action with USA TODAY's political channel. 10 years after Bush v. Gore, new concerns about voting MAPLEWOOD, Mo.  Patrick Miller's training class for assistant supervisors of St. Louis County's polling places is a three-hour blur of touch-screens and paper scanners, Personal Electronic Ballots and Palm Pilots, flash cards and memory cards, yellow envelopes, orange duffels and red canvas bags that look just right for delivering pizzas. It's a long way from punch cards. It has also been 10 years since Bush v. Gore forever changed the way America votes. Since Nov. 7, 2000, when Florida's Palm Beach County etched the phrase "hanging chad" into the nation's political lexicon, 75% of the nation's voters have been forced to change the way they vote. New York became the latest to make the switch this year when it replaced lever machines with the optical-scan equipment that reads votes recorded on paper, which now dominate the market. MAP: Track House, Senate and governor races The verdict? Elections are more accurate: There is less chance that voters will make mistakes, and there are safeguards in case they do. Access has been expanded, as millions of people now vote early or by mail. Voters are learning the ropes, but election officials can get overwhelmed. And mistakes still occur — though none so egregious that it has taken a Supreme Court ruling before the election was decided, as was the case in 2000. For the 2010 elections two weeks from today, the past decade's changes reduce the chances of major disputes at the polls — but don't rule them out. Once again, election officials are keeping their fingers crossed. Ten years after Florida's infamous "butterfly" ballot confused voters and created the impetus for Congress to mandate that states upgrade their voting machines and registration databases, democracy in America is challenged by expanded voting calendars and methods, dwindling budgets and equipment that's fast becoming outmoded. "We've gone through a decade now, and election administrators are going to have to face the fact that what we bought 10 years ago is now falling apart," says Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services. There's little money available to replace equipment that goes bad. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 called for $3.65 billion to be sent to the states, but about $500 million never was appropriated by Congress. Most of the rest has been spent. "It has a potential to put us at risk, simply because the budget cuts have been so deep in many parts of the country," says Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, which represents state election directors. Election officials, poll workers and voters are responsible for most of the mistakes that mar elections each year. This year's primaries featured the usual array of late poll openings, long lines and malfunctioning machines from New York to Hawaii. Extensive early and absentee voting in two-thirds of the states will ease pressure at the polls for the Nov. 2 midterm congressional elections, but not without adding a degree of difficulty for election officials. Election analysts say the changes wrought by Florida's fiasco in 2000 have been worthwhile. About 1 million votes that used to be lost because of errors made on ballots are now being counted, says Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even so, "there's probably another million lost votes to be had by making ballots less confusing and by making sure that the boring stuff of election administration is taken care of," he says. The new voting methods, tight budgets and aging equipment present a challenge in St. Louis County. Already, officials here must print ballots for 92 municipalities that serve 670,000 registered voters. They must find 6,000 poll workers in presidential election years such as 2008, when Missouri had the closest race among states, ultimately going for Republican John McCain by 3,600 votes out of 2.9 million cast. "What we have today is no better, and in many cases not as good, as punch card," says Joseph Goeke, the Republican election director. Opening a 'Pandora's box' New York's better-late-than-never switch signaled the end of manual lever voting machines that dominated the nation's polling places 30 years ago. Lever machines produced no record of each voter's ballot and were subject to tampering. Punch-card ballots became all the rage through the 1980s and '90s, but they were subject to mistakes by voters. Then came Florida, where thousands of voters confused by Palm Beach County's ballot design in the 2000 elections voted for the wrong presidential candidate, or for two candidates by mistake. The most common error: voters casting ballots for both Democrat Al Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, indicating that they made a mistake the first time. Republican George W. Bush ultimately won the state by 537 votes. "It opened up the Pandora's box," says Tova Wang, an elections specialist at Demos, a liberal advocacy group. "It sort of put elections under the microscope for the first time and unveiled a whole host of problems that go beyond voting machines." After the Florida debacle, punch cards went the way of the Edsel, and both optical-scan and touch-screen voting quickly came to dominate the market. Even so, problems didn't disappear. In 2003, the chief executive of Diebold, a leading manufacturer of touch-screen machines, wrote a fundraising letter in Ohio for Bush. Electronic chicanery never was proven, but the letter touched off years of costly and time-consuming tests of touch-screens, leading to the advent of voter-verified paper trails. In 2006, nearly 18,000 voters in Sarasota, Fla., did not cast a ballot in a congressional race, mostly because of the way their touch-screen ballots were designed. Republican Vern Buchanan won the race by 369 votes. That led to a national debate over ballot design. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University reported last month that there have been similar machine breakdowns in various places through the years, because of the lack of reporting procedures or a nationwide database to catalogue such incidents. "Unlike for other industries, we don't keep track," says Brennan's Lawrence Norden. That's not to say the electronic machines aren't an improvement over levers and punch cards. They cut down on mistakes by warning voters who vote more than once in the same contest, so that they can fix it. The touch-screens offer privacy for voters with disabilities, including the visually impaired. What's more, the statewide voter-registration databases and the system of provisional, or second-chance, voting for those whose registrations are challenged at the polls have cut down on disenfranchisement. Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap recalls his state used to rely on 503 separate town-voter lists, some of which weren't even written down. Today's problems are different from the ones that threw Bush v. Gore to the Supreme Court: •Equipment, manufactured mostly by three major vendors, can break down. "The machines are showing their wear and tear in just five years," says Rokey Suleman, executive director of the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics. •Paper used to cast ballots or record touch-screen votes causes problems. "It fades, it swells, it warps," says Merle King, executive director of the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. •Election Day workers, who make little more than minimum wage for shifts that often stretch 15 hours, can get overwhelmed. They, rather than the machines, tend to make errors. "It's not like the machines whisper, 'Don't program me correctly,' 'Deliver me late,' " says Thad Hall, an elections specialist at the University of Utah. 'It's a brand-new world' St. Louis County was still grappling with hanging chads in 2004. "There was so much chad in our tabulation room that it looked like it snowed," Goeke recalls. But thanks to voter-education efforts, after the last punch-card election in 2006, "I could only find two pieces." Missouri has had its share of election controversy, however. Dead people voting. Felons voting. People voting twice. Photo identification requirements passed by the Legislature but tossed out in court. A Justice Department injunction over voter rolls, also thrown out in court. The state even had a dog registered to vote. For decades, the county has had a tradition of scrupulous bipartisanship. Goeke, a former Circuit Court judge, is the Republican director; Joe Donahue, a former school board member, is the Democratic director. Classes at the county Board of Elections must have one trainer from each party. Doors leading to election equipment are double-locked. "We're like Noah's ark here," Goeke says. "We have one Republican and one Democrat for everything." The county's 449 polling stations have a mix of machines — some paper, some touch-screen. Watching over them is a bureaucracy of supervisors, assistant supervisors, 115 technicians including captains and super-captains, and so many thousands of poll workers that Donohue wants a system of conscription similar to jury duty. Much of the burden falls on the assistant supervisors who maintain the machines on Election Day. At Miller's training class one recent afternoon, Elaine Waldmann cringes when it comes time to change the roll of paper that gives touch-screen voters a chance to check their ballots. "Everyone hates that part," Waldmann, 73, says. Otherwise, she says, touch-screens are "quicker, faster. Bing-bing-bing, you're out of there." Except that the nation's ballots are "the longest in the world," Stewart says. Minimum length in St. Louis County this year: eight pages. The paper ballots can get confusing. To guide officials, the Code of State Regulations includes four pages of sample ballots marked correctly and incorrectly for famous Missourians Harry S. Truman, George Washington Carver, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Mark Twain. Some early voters this year seem satisfied with the system. "Nothing is perfect, but hopefully this is an improvement," says Sharron McCallum after using a touch-screen for the first time. Tony Marcinkiewicz, 64, has learned touch-screens, but he longs to place his ballot in a box. "I kind of miss that part of it," he says. "But what are you going to do? It's a brand-new world." Awaiting 'the next meltdown' That world may change again in the coming decade. Voting machines will wear out, and there is little incentive to develop the next generation unless someone has the money to buy them. Federal funding has almost run out. States and localities are broke. As a result, most states and counties will have to limp along with their current equipment until they can afford to replace it. And until then, manufacturers will have little reason to innovate. "We will see innovation if there's money for it," says Dan Tokaji, an elections expert at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. "We won't if there's not." In Los Angeles County, the nation's largest voting jurisdiction, an optical-scan system in use since 2002 is on its last legs. "It isn't a viable system moving forward," says Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk. He has some federal money saved but says, "There is no system to go to." Much of the focus nationally is on reducing Election Day crowds and confusion. States are making it easier to vote ahead of time, without requiring an excuse. That tends to be in the form of early, in-person voting and the expanded use of voting by mail, particularly prevalent on the West Coast. It all adds convenience, but possibly at the risk of accuracy, Stewart says. Mail ballots can be lost or mismarked. He's working on a report that will show that while votes have been protected by improved technology in California, others are at risk because of mistakes made on mailed ballots. "I am waiting for the next meltdown being related to absentee ballots," Stewart says. Many election officials, including all four top officials in St. Louis County, expect widespread voting on the Internet within 10 years, despite concerns about identity theft, fraud and confidentiality. One step in that direction was taken last year, when Congress passed the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act. It requires states to offer blank ballots electronically to the 4.5 million potential voters abroad and to conduct pilot projects on Internet voting. Already, however, the Justice Department has sued New York and New Mexico for not sending ballots on time. Twenty-one states permit at least some overseas ballots to be returned by e-mail. The District of Columbia ran a trial on Internet voting earlier this month and invited computer scientists to try hacking into the system. A University of Michigan professor succeeded; voters downloading a ballot were greeted with the Michigan fight song. Even so, during the next decade "there is no business model that I am aware of that does not include the Internet in some shape or form," says Kennesaw State University's King. The challenge will be finding the money to create such a voting system, developing the technology, and training staffs and voters. In that sense, the Help America Vote Act remains an act in progress. "It's never going to be done," says Maine's Dunlap. "This is an incredibly dynamic process." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. 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