On 540 Am on the ride home tonight they mentioned 2nd grade class whose teacher duplicated the ballot in question. Instead of punching holes, they had to color in a circle. The teacher handed out the ballots and told the class to vote for Al Gore without further instruction.
They all did it.
Another caller said his three year old got it right.
Now conservative talk radio isn’t the most impartial source, but I think a mountain is being made out of a molehill here.
You have the right to vote, but you also have the responsibility to get it right if you want your vote to count.
In 1996 16000 votes were disqualified. This 19,000 seems about what we would expect if the ballot weren’t a factor since there was a higher turnout this year.
Election occurs on election day folks. Unless Fraud is claimed, there is no recourse for a revote under Florida law.
If we did allow a revote, it would seem we must also have a revote in any other district in the country where there were disqualified ballots. Otherwise we are givng more power to Palm Beach Voters and disenfranchising the rest of the country’s right to an equal vote.
Gore needs to fight as best he can, that’s part of the process, but I think this revote thing is ridiculous. Plus I don’t want people who find the instruction “punch one hole only” to be ambiguous deciding who the next President will be.
I also heard on the radio that Brazil was laughing at us because of the fuss over the ballot. Brazil, man! Brazil
The children could see each other and copy off each other. Since they’re all voting for the same person, they would know they’ve got to have the thing as their neighbor.
I doubt 2nd graders have poor eyesight.
Did the teacher use the exact same ballot? Any attempt to duplicate it could end up significantly different than the actual ballot.
Cite, please? All of them?
There were also printing problems that may have misaligned the ballot.
We used butterfly ballots in Chicago. The presidential section was fine for me, a reasonably bright person with good vision, but with the other pages I recall thinking “shit, I sure hope I punched the right one”; I triple-checked the punches and I’m pretty sure I got 'em right, but I was still concerned. I can understand completely if the voters in Florida were confused. I’m not calling for a revote necessarily, but I think it entirely possible that a lot of people may have messed it up.
Item 1, Possible, so conceded (but the balloters could have asked for help, or looked at somebody else sample, and still messed up.)
Item 2, Conceded.
Item 3, the teacher “duplicated” the ballot. The kids penciled the marks rather than punched holes. It could be a good dupe, or bad, I dunno.
Item 4, cite request: http://www.Scyllasbrain.com I listened to it on the radio. It was 540 AM, talkradio. Howie something or other. He said “all.” Could a truck have gone by and I misheard it? Sure, but it didn’t happen. He said “all.”
That’s all I got, so I’m gonna go with it.
We can email a whole bunch of people to confirm he said “all,” or you could provisionally take my word for it.
Maybe it will show up on the news. I’ll keep an eye open.
Item 5, That’s the first I heard of that. More info? What does “may have misaligned” mean? (not that I doubt you, but there’s been contradictory info quite a bit in the last day or so, and this should be easily verified.)
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Arrgh, someone mentioned it on the board and I can’t find it again. (You try running a search on “gore”, “ballot” and “palm beach” and see how many flipping threads you get. And I can’t remember the exact phrasing so I’d pretty much have to read them all over again.) So, I will retract that unless I can rustle up a source (although, you’re just repeating stuff you heard, too, so… ). I could possibly replace it with another argument if the sample ballots the voters were given showed the names in a different order, as I have also heard. Given the already confusing ballot design, I can see how that would make it worse. Give those second-graders a sheet showing a vote for Gore as being the second box. Let them look it over and take it with them to the voting booth. Now give them a ballot and see what they mark. I suspect a lot of people, given an official sample ballot listing the proper names of the canidates and seeing that theirs is the second box, will go ahead and mark the second box when they get the “real” ballot. I’d need to find out the order the names were listed in the sample ballot, though.
I really do think a lot of people mispunched those ballots. link “As a possible result of the confusion caused by the ballot configuration, LePore’s office said that 19,120 ballots for president had to be discarded because people punched holes for more than one candidate. That was 4.1 percent of the 462,000 ballots cast. By contrast, 3,783 ballots, or 0.82 percent, were tossed out for the same reason in the U.S. Senate race.” …That says to me people were confused and double-punched five times as often in the presidential vote. That seems fairly significant. If, as some have claimed, 16,500 of those were Gore-Buchanan double-punches, I think it is pretty clear that the ballot was confusing, and most likely most of those 16,500 intended to vote for Gore.
Well, I’m mostly wondering if it actually happened at all, and the circumstances under which it happened. Let me know if you find confirmation.
It’s a lot easier to determine where to mark a flat sheet of paper than to punch a ballot. Because the ballot pages are raised about 1cm above where you punch the ballot and they are separated by a metal bar, it’s not nearly as easy to figure out what went where as it would be on a flat xerox. It’s a matter of perspective; you’re viewing the ballot at an angle from above, and given the difference between the raised ballot pages and the lower ballot punch-place (there must be a name for that), the holes appear to shift and aren’t neatly aligned. I really was genuinely concerned about whether I had punched the ballots right.
Obviously, much of what we’re hearing may or may not be accurate. With that proviso, and as stated in other threads, 15,000 ballots were thrown out in 1996 because of double-punching, in an election with lower turnout. So 19,000 this year shouldn’t be unexpected.
And does this problem occur in other places these ballots are used? And what on earth would possess people to cause them to punch out two holes?
Kyberneticist, the first link you posted on ballot usability is to Dan Bricklin’s web site. Do you realize he was the co-creator of VisiCalc, the very first computer spreadsheet program? The original killer app – how cool is that!
I was watching ABC’s Primetime and they interviewed a number of folks about related topics. One they talked to was a professor at a Florida law school and didn’t seem to be involved with either party (they identified all the other ones who were).
He said that two recent Florida Supreme Court rulings have indicated that in cases where there are problems, Florida courts not only can, but should order revotes. So far, they have not done so, but it is not outside the realm of possibility.
Furthermore, there are apparently similar laws in Georgia, and Georgia courts have ordered revotes.
So I don’t think it’s nearly as clear as you’ve stated here.
Maybe if you were committing voter fraud and were rushing to punch holes without the aid of the machine. Maybe that would cause you to mess up and either vote in the wrong hole, or in two holes.
I’m not claiming anything, I’m just offering one thing on earth that could cause this.
A Bush supporter in my office noted that the easiest way to screw with an election would not be to stuff the ballot boxes with more votes for Bush, but to ruin the ballots of those who went with Gore – by pushing out another hole, for example.
Another coworker noted that this was one way things were done in the old Chicago machine days – election judges or counters or whoever would put a small pencil lead or something like that under a fingernail. Then, as they were handed a ballot or counting one, they could easily pop out another hole and invalidate the vote.
Adding to what I said to Scylla about having a re-vote, there is an article in the Chicago Tribune that discusses this. Here is the important quote:
“The standard for now will be Florida law, which gives a judge authority to call a new election if he or she determines the results didn’t reflect the ‘will of the people.’”
Like I said, it’s not nearly as clear as you made it out to be.
Another possible explanation I heard on the radio - some people thought they were punching one hole for president and one hole for vice-president. Granted, if true, those would not be the most experienced voters.
Wow. Did not know that. Explains why Slashdot posted it.
He would certainly know about usability issues then. I have a lot more respect for the opinions expressed now.
