Last month, as more voting machine glitches turned up in a special election in Florida, and earlier mistakes that were discovered elsewhere last year remained uninvestigated, former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker announced the formation of a bipartisan, non-governmental commission to scan the whole federal election system. They will hold public hearings on the electoral debacles we have gone through and will report to Congress by September. It's about time.

Joining them will be the former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and two former members of the House, Democrat Lee Hamilton of Indiana and Republican Susan Molinari of New York.

After the discovery of problems in six elections, the latest Florida fiasco, last month, brought the resignation of the Miami-Dade election supervisor, hired from Chicago after 28,000 ballots, mostly punch cards, went uncounted in the 2000 election. This time, in an election to okay slot machines, there was a high number of ballots with no recorded votes, known as "undervotes."

Two years ago, Congress belatedly passed the so called Help America Vote Act. The abbreviated title of that ineffective bill—HAVA—quickly gave it the sneering name "the Half A Vote Act."

It remains such an unrepaired mess, not sufficiently documented in the print or broadcast media, that we asked our scholarly contributor Margie Burns, an ardent Internet researcher, to share her discoveries. When she isn't probing the web for little-disclosed atrocities, voting or other, she is a professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

s The Washington Spectator discussed at length [January 15], big problems affect our electoral college. But more immediate problems impair our essential processes of collecting and counting individual votes.

The release of the exit polls conducted on Election Day this past November in all states showed a pattern that cannot be explained away. These were the original exit polls, taken before the outcome of the election was known. They were not the exit polls that were altered after the election, making them conform retroactively to published vote tallies.

The original exit-poll results are in clear and striking contrast to the final vote tallies given the public. Key discrepancies include the following:

1. Contrary to results in every national election for the past 20 years, the difference between the exit polls and the published vote tally was more than two percentage points—in other words, a swing of between 3 and 5 percent or more to President Bush in 33 out of 51 jurisdictions in a number of states. Regardless of which candidate won in those states, the variance went in the same direction—toward Bush.

2. Even in nine states showing less difference between the exit polls and the official vote tallies, there was still a smaller swing toward the president in the published vote tally, including in heavily Democratic Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

3. This crucial swing toward Bush occurred in every one of the close states. Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa all allegedly had the same "red state" (Republican) shift. Most allegedly shifted more than two percentage points. In other words, there was a swing of 3 to 5 percent regardless of the size or the region of the state, or whether it went for Bush or for Kerry.

To sum up, a four-out-of-five-state Election Day swing to Bush was alleged even though new voters, independent voters, and younger voters were trending toward Kerry. It was an election where there was increased voter turnout, and this usually favors the challenger.

The statistical problem here is obvious: if the exit polls were simply wrong, then they should have erred randomly at various locations and in favor of different candidates.

FINALLY, SOME EXPERTISE—A paper titled "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy" has been published by Dr. Steven F. Freeman, whose Ph.D. in organizational studies came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who holds professorships at the University of Pennsylvania; he runs an international business administration program created at Harvard.