A non-controversial (I hope) question about the Florida recount.
When they do the recount, do they also check to make sure that the votes are legitimate? That is, do they check to see if any non-citizens voted, if anyone voted twice, if anyone who was no longer a resident of Florida voted, etc.? What about provisional ballots? Are those being included in the tally or not?
It seems to me that in order to truly get an accurate bead on the situation, one would have to verify that each vote is legitimate, not just how many each candidate received.
A couple of observations I’ve culled from the incessant news coverage:
Ballots with more than one candidate selected were not included in the first count. I hear about 19,000 of these were thrown out in Palm Beach County. (One wonders if they were mostly from people thinking “Hmmm…Gore is the second one listed here, so I’ll just punch this second hole. Awww, crap, I just voted for Buchanan. Who the hell designed these things? Okay, I punch this one for Gore. There! Say, are they gonna count this one with two markings? Well, I guess it can’t hurt to have an additional vote for Buchanan; no danger he’ll be elected anyway. And I certainly don’t want to let everyone here know I’m an idiot by asking for another ballot 'cause I messed this one up…”)
If you go to cnn.com, you can see an up-to-the-half-hour-or-so tally of the recount. In a perfectly run election, the recount table would look something like this:
BUSH: change: -n
GORE: change: +n
In fact, both candidates gained votes–Bush about 500, Gore about 2000. Where are these extra votes coming from? Why were they not counted in the first place? CNN’s graph indicated that absentee ballots are NOT included in their count. I know absentee ballots are continually coming in, adding votes for both candidates.
Help! Could someone explain to me how both candidates are gaining votes in a recount?
I guess the simplest solution is that CNN is, in fact, including absentee ballots as they are counted, and the caption on their graph is a filthy lie. Any other possibilities?
I’m not in Florida, but I have served as a Poll Official in another US jurisdiction, which goes like this:
All those challenges to the person’s eligibility to vote have to be made before the vote is cast. We have an “open season” up to 4 months before the election, that the registry lists are open to all parties to observe and challenge anyone on them. In every polling place there is a ward list of the eligible voters for the Officials to cross-check so if the person gets as far as walking into the booth with ballot in hand (in mechanical-voting jurisdictions, I suppose the equivalent would be before they pull the first lever) it’s usually too late for challenges. If the person is subjected to a last-minute challenge, what will happen IS that his/her ballot will be placed in a sealed, numbered envelope. Later, when the Elections Commission checks the validity of challenged ballots, they’ll say something like: “Envelope 45327, valid” and the clerk will break the seal and blindly toss the ballot into a ballot box used for that purpose only. Then at the end of the time period for this to be done, those ballots will be counted w/o violating the “secrecy” of the votes.
Folks who are eligible but registered too late to show up on the ward list, are sent to a special polling place where they are required to produce the supporting documents and complete proof of identity.
However, once the marked ballot goes into the ballot box, it can only be annulled because of being void on its face: voted more than once, defaced, being marked in such a way that you can make no sense of who the person voted for, being mutilated, being externally “marked” as to identify who voted for whom, being shown upon examination to be a counterfeit, or lacking a mark that the local poll officials make on every ballot before giving it to the voter to verify it was one of the ballots issued to that polling place (and not, say, a hi-quality counterfeit) (BTW, officials from all parties running have to cross-check the ballots before and after the voting so that no more turn up in the box than were issued). The sight-impaired are given the ballot in a plastic template overlay printed in Braille. Others who may be impaired from using the voting gear are allowed to designate “one person of their complete trust, freely chosen” to aid them in marking the ballot.
Thanks for the info guys. As far as Misterbk’s question, the answer is that recounted votes don’t necessarily shift from one candidate to another. Some ballot holes are only partially punched out and therefore not counted until a more careful recount. I’m sure there are other problems as well.