Ninety percent of the residents in those precincts are black or Latino, and they voted 94 percent for Gore. Cook County Clerk David Orr has launched a probe into the varying rates of nullified votes. We don't know how much of it was by choice. The controversy has taken on a partisan cast. After filling out their ballots, voters feed them into counting machines in the precincts, which spit them out if certain types of mistakes are noted.
Voters then get a second chance to cast valid ballots.
Some largely white, GOP-leaning counties nearby already are allowed to use this technology, which reduces their rate of nullified ballots to near zero. Some counties were allowed to use the second-chance equipment on their counting machines because they use a different kind of voting machinery. While Chicago and Cook County use punch-card machines, the heavily Republican and white DeKalb and McHenry counties nearby use optical scan equipment, on which voters mark ballots with a pen. Ten years ago a candidate for Cook County clerk, Joanne Alter, released a detailed 48-page study showing how disproportionate numbers of votes cast by black voters were being discarded. It noted that in the 1988 presidential election, no vote was registered on 9 percent of the ballots in some of Chicago's black sections, while in the affluent suburb of Elk Grove the proportion was 1 percent.