I am often asked whether I believe the 2004 election was "stolen." My answer is usually "unlikely" but it depends on what you mean by stolen. Most people are referring to the voting machines being hacked or otherwise manipulated. What I say is if you were to take into account all the ways in which voters were disenfranchised as a result of error, incompetence, and malfeasance, who knows?

This is amply demonstrated in one particular finding of the recent report by the Democratic Party on the 2004 election in Ohio that 25 percent of white voters and 52 percent of African American voters had problems at the polls. Those difficulties included ballot problems, having to go to more than one polling place, and/or experiences of voter intimidation. Three percent of voters actually left the polls because of the long lines and did not or could not return to vote.

In the months leading up to the election, an avid group of computer scientists, politicians, and members of the public raised great alarm about the possibility that new computer voting machines were vulnerable to hacking and manipulation, as well as a variety of possible malfunctions. As I pointed out right after the election, however, the biggest machine problem on Election Day wasn't the efficacy of the machines, however, but the number of machines employed.

Elections officials, whether through incompetence or intentional efforts to suppress the vote, did more damage than any particular technology might have done by failing to supply sufficient numbers of voting machines. And as the House Judiciary Democratic Committee investigation found in Ohio, "There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas." Right after the election the Washington Post reported that, "local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry."

All over the country, voters had to wait in line for up to nine hours. Interestingly, however, some of the worst of it was in key battleground states. Observing early voting in a Broward County, Florida shopping mall, I myself encountered numerous voters, some of them elderly, who had waited five to six hours to vote. The worst of it evidently was on the campus of Kenyon College in Ohio where there were only two voting machines. According to the Beacon Journal, one student waited ten hours—until 2 a.m.—to vote.

Such waiting times are tantamount to disenfranchisement for many average working Americans, possibly in violation of federal voting laws and constitutional guarantees. How many people can stay away from their jobs for hours on end to vote? What about the single working mother who has to deal with her job and her kids? What about the man who is working two or three jobs to make ends meet?

Some say expanding early and mail voting is the answer. But as I said in a previous Taking Note, such practices present their own set of problems.

An Election Day holiday might help, but since that's unlikely, elected leaders and elections officials should deal with the problem at hand: States and localities should reassess their voting systems needs and base the number of machines deployed on Election Day to the number of registered voters in the jurisdiction as of the latest possible count. Jurisdictions ought to also take into account such factors as voting age population; voter turnout in past recent elections; number of voters who have registered since the most recent election; the educational levels and socio-economic indicators in the jurisdiction; and the needs and numbers of disabled voters and voters with limited English proficiency.

We have enough problems in this country getting people to the polls. Let's not force them away after they've gotten there.

Tova Andrea Wang is a senior program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.