The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project:
Assessment of Voting Technology
Professor Stephen Ansolabehere
Department of Political Science
MIT
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project was created in December 2000, following
the controversial election recount of the 2000 presidential vote in Florida. The goal of
this project is to assess and improve voting systems in the United States. From 2000 to
2004, Professor Stephen Ansolabehere of the MIT Political Science Department led the
team.
The first step in the project was to provide the nation’s first analysis of the performance
of voting technologies. In January, 2001, Professor Ansolabehere was invited to
contribute to the Florida Governor’s Task Force on Election Reform. At that time the
team had just finished a preliminary assessment of voting technologies and found, to our
surprise, that electronic voting had not fared well in the counties where it had been
introduced compared with optically scanned paper ballots, the main competing
technology on the market in 2001.
Professor Ansolabehere wrote the report “Residual Votes Attributable to Voting
Technology” and presented it to the Florida commission. The data in the report led the
commission to allow counties to purchase either optical scanning or electronics, rather
than to require electronics throughout.
That report and expanded versions written in March and July, 2001, were widely
circulated during the ensuing months of debate on election administration reform
throughout the United States. Presentations were of it were made to the United States
Congress, to the National Conference of State Legislatures, to the National Commission
on Federal Election Reform, to many state and local election officials, and to various
organizations.
The report evolved into a journal article “Voting Technology and Uncounted Votes in the
United States” published in the Journal of Politics.
Presented here are the three versions of the initial report and the final journal article, and
the database created for this analysis.