The Times had lumped together two very different optic scan setups, and focused only on one possible error, undervotes. In reality, Florida voting results show, when it came to producing countable votes, the punch card has an equally bad counterpart in the optic scan system, when those votes are counted at a central location instead of at precincts. In 16 Florida counties, the voting process stops there. Good or bad, the ballots are dropped into a box and trucked to a central spot for counting after the polls close. But in 22 other Florida counties, including Leon, the filled-in ballots are fed into a counter at the precinct.
Bad ballots are spit back and the voter gets a second, even a third, chance to try again.
Asher helped publicize some of the earliest work condemning the punch card as error-prone 22 years ago, and finally the system appears doomed. Nowhere in Florida was there an uncounted-ballot problem as big as in Gadsden County. The county led the state with 11 percent of its presidential ballots spoiled by overvoting. In one precinct, one out of every five ballots was bad. I think there were too many presidential candidates.