By Thomas Hargrove
Scripps Howard News Service

The Series Part 1: Analysis says vote system failing Part 2: How the vote study was done Part 3: 12 states don't even tally voters

The total number of voters who go to the polls are not tallied in a dozen states, denying election officials a critical piece of information necessary to determine whether ballots are being lost because of mismanagement, voter confusion or mechanical errors.

Thirty-eight states - either through legislation or by mandates from the secretary of state's office - direct local polling officials and county election supervisors to report the total number of ballots cast in each election.

This information permitted Florida officials to know this year that at least 170,000 ballots were not counted in the presidential race out of the 6.2 million ballots cast.

"This information is very useful," said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. "It gives us a more accurate view of what voter turnout really is. And it provides a better check on the function of the electoral process."

A tally of total ballots cast is not made in Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

"That just has never been a problem here that has required a solution," said Alabama Secretary of State Jim Bennett. "What happened in Florida is not likely to happen here. Sixty-two of our 67 counties are using optical scanners rather than punch cards. Maybe Florida will consider switching their voting systems."

Bennett said he is not opposed to considering such counts in the future. "We will be taking a close look (at all voting procedures) to make sure we don't have bad times in the future," he said.

Many states are collecting the voter information but are not using it to double-check the accuracy of the tallies they certify. West Virginia recently discovered that Tyler County made a 1,000-vote error in the 1996 election, something that would have been obvious immediately if state officials had compared the vote against the number of ballots cast.

"That is probably a statistic we should be looking at," conceded West Virginia Deputy Secretary of State Mary Ratliff.

Election experts hope the problems discovered in Florida this year will prompt all states to record the number of ballots cast and compare this statistic against reported votes for president, senator and governor.

"When we first started gathering these data in 1948, there were only 18 states that were recording ballots cast. Now more and more states have joined this bandwagon," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services which acts as a consultant to local and state election supervisors.

"I would urge the other states to start counting ballots as well," Brace said. "Without that, we don't know how many problems are out there."