Roy G. Saltman, who as the federal government’s top expert on voting technology wrote a prescient butlittle-read report warning about hanging chads on punch-card ballots more than a decade before the issue paralyzed the nation during the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida, died April 21 at a nursing home in Rockville, Md. He was 90.
The cause was complications from several recent strokes, said his grandson Max Saltman.
Like legions of Washington bureaucrats who are vital figures in their narrow fields but largely unknown to the wider public, Mr. Saltman toiled in obscurity for decades at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he wrote several reports examining the history of voting devices and the problems with them.
In a 132-page report published in 1988, Mr. Saltman detailed how hanging chads — the tiny pieces of cardboard that sometimes aren’t totally punched out on ballots — had plagued several recent elections, including a 1984 race for property appraiser in Palm Beach County, Fla.
“It is recommended,” Mr. Saltman wrote, “that the use of pre-scored punch card ballots be ended.”
As with many recommendations issued from the bowels of thefederal bureaucracy, Mr. Saltman’s report was paid little to no attention.
Twelve years later, chaos erupted in Florida.
The presidential race between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush ended in a lengthy recount during which election officials spent weeks examining hanging chads. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ended the process, handing the presidency to Bush.
By then, Mr. Saltman’s earlier report was being discussed at congressional hearings and on think tank panels examining what went wrong in Florida.
“It has always puzzled me why my report never got a wider acceptance,” he told USA Today in 2001. “It takes a crisis to move people, and it shouldn’t have.”
Condolences to his family and friends.