But Congress is stuck rehashing the 2000 election. Members of both political parties are blaming their opponents for inaction as an increasingly clear picture emerges of the country's busted elections system. Robert Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, said about 2 million votes were cast but not counted in November. The shock, he said, isn't that the number was so high. Rather, it's that about the same number of votes have not been counted in each of the past several presidential elections.
Voter rolls across the country are incomplete or inaccurate.
One in every five voter registrations on file in Indiana was bogus. Alaska in 1998 had 66,000 more registered voters than Census estimates of its voting age population. Florida, ground zero for the bombs of criticism lobbed after the election, did not have the most widespread problems, according to an investigation by the Chicago Tribune. That dubious distinction goes to Illinois, where the Tribune found that 190,000 votes were not counted. Testimony from elections officials and political observers across the country has made it clear that election problems are national.