Undervotes - The Scary Canary

[UncountedMary]

In 2004 massive get-out-the-vote efforts created a huge turnout on Election Day, bringing more voters to the polls than ever before. But in key states (and The Keystone state), many voters showed up at the polls and waited in long lines for hours only to later discover the voting machines showed many of them had no vote recorded for any presidential candidate.

This particular scary canary in a coalmine is known as presidential "undervotes" – ballots cast without recording a choice for the highest office in the land.

In this clip, UNCOUNTED focuses on instances of undervoting in two battleground states in 2004 – New Mexico and Pennsylvania. New Mexico had a particularly large problem, where presidential undervote rates of 25% were reported in Democratic-leaning Hispanic and American Indian precincts. New Mexico had the nation’s highest presidential undervote rate – 21,084. (George W. Bush won that state by less than 6,000 votes.)

2008 might have a lot things in common with 2004. Now we'll know what to look for if undervotes are one of them.