If that then … oh well. No fixing it now.
Perhaps we should consider the advantages of not enabling and coddling our duller citizens. If some standards and practices can be hammered out, and pesky legal problems waved off, there are some cromulent possibilities! Perhaps not erase that political power but shift it into more deserving and worthy crania!
For instance, a message board devoted to fighting ignorance is a self-selecting demographic of smart voters. (I suspect there are far more Mensa members among us than any other random grouping, because we are a bunch of smart and elitist snots.)
Perhaps enhancing the political power of smart people would be the first step toward Cecilian world domination. Who better to shrewdly apply political power? We could do like the Republicans do, use political power to vote ourselves more political power! Gradually, the reins of power will be within our grasp, and the world would be under our benign and humane guidance.
Groovy!
I actually don’t think educated voters are necessarily better voters than uneducated voters. But I do feel pretty safe in saying that voters who can cast a vote successfully are more qualified to pick our representatives than a voter who finds simple things baffling. This, and the butterfly ballot in 2000, are cases where no one could have predicted there would be a problem until it happened, because… damn. It’s just not that hard. And every time they try to make it simpler, but there are always some who just can’t do it.
Except that there are well-known standard principles of ballot design which would have eliminated the butterfly ballot problem, even if nobody realized in advance that the butterfly design would have been confusing. And except that we’re talking about several percent-- How hard would it be to test a ballot design with a focus group of a hundred people?
sigh Looks like I have to admit, I appear to have had the wrong end of the stick, when it comes to Broward county.
I’d been unconsciously assuming that the general layout of the ballots, in all counties, was about the same. Different races, but everything in the same general position. That would make the undervote very odd indeed, in comparison to other counties.
It’s now looking to me that this is not the case; that Broward is the only county to stick a race down there on the lower left. That’d make the relative undervote much more understandable.
Can anyone confirm for me that I am indeed missing something? Is the Broward county in-person ballot different in that way from all the others?
(Mine is, but it’s an absentee ballot, and I’d been assuming that it was formatted differently, for letter size paper.)
So, do morons, or people who cannot look down and left have a right to have their illegal votes counted?
If they put their mark in the oval, yes. If there’s no mark in a particular oval, how would we know what their vote was? It all comes back to was it simple dumbness, or was there a calibration or similar issue with the machines.
You jumped the shark - how are their votes illegal?
More defense of democracy…
In other news, an election official allowed people to vote by email, which is totally legal and in no way able to be circumvented to allow illegal votes or voters.
I’ll let you guess the party affiliation, but it MIGHT just be the party crying about voter fraud and how Democrats are trying to steal elections by, ya know, actually counting the votes.
Your link says
So, I think you meant “totally illegal”.
Are you insinuating that I would DARE impugn the morality and righteousness of Republicans, implying that they did something illegal during a very close election, via sarcastic incrimination?
Because I absolutely did. The party crying about voter fraud is actively committing voter fraud. I’m sorry the sarcasm didn’t carry.
Yeah, yeah, we humans are a stupid bunch, as anyone who’s worked a help desk will tell you. But we’re also inattentive. We tend to find instructions dull and idiotic (" I know how to vote.")and plunge in without reading them.
Or the instructions say to use a pen with dark ink, and we use a dark fine-line Sharpie, which bleeds through just enough to screw up the scanner.
Or we mark the oval next to Candidate A AND fill the name in on the write-in blank just to make sure it’s clear we want A, dammit, A, not that idiot B, and we don’t realize the optical scanner counts that as an over-vote.
Or we don’t even realize we made a microscopic stray mark with the pen.
Or, having just been instructed to pick any TWO for each of the last three races, we don’t even notice the instruction to vote for just ONE on the fourth.
Even otherwise intelligent people screw up.
Wasnt it the great Richard M. Nixon who said (paraphrased) ‘When a Republican President or one who serves him does it, then it is not illegal’ ?
Let’s say there’s a state statute that says: in between the voting and the counting, the election officials are to choose one ballot in each race which they should choose as they see fit, and throw the rest in the incinerator.
What you’re saying is that this statute would be perfectly legit because nowhere in the Constitution does it mention a right of citizens to have their votes counted.
That’s an interesting stance, to put it mildly.
And when will they start being used to count the Miami-Dade ballots?
The ballot scanning machines are just dumb machines. They don’t know what any of those markings on the page mean. Someone has to adjust each machine so it knows what marks, on what part of the page, are to be counted, and what name each location on the page is to be associated with. Someone else has to test it and make sure it’s doing it reliably. This isn’t an instantaneous process, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Well, quite honestly that’s a big steaming crock of bullshit.
If I was making out a checklist in advance for how I’m going to vote, it would have stuff like governor, Senator, Representative, etc. at the top of the list.
But who carries a checklist like that into the voting booth? I don’t go into the voting booth saying to myself, “don’t forget to vote for governor/Senator/whatever.” You kinda figure your ballot will be your checklist: that if you go through it systematically, you’ll vote for governor, Senator, Representative, and so forth.
So if one race is tucked in in the lower left under the instructions, away from the other races, and you don’t see it because you mentally register the instructions as taking up the whole column, you just start with that second column and keep on going. It would be extremely easy to fail to notice that you’d never voted for Senator.
As DSeid said, “If that then … oh well. No fixing it now.” Because that’s how our crazy system works. We don’t test stuff like this ahead of time (or at least, there’s no requirement to do so), and if something doesn’t go quite right as a result, oh well.
We really need a nationwide uniform ballot for voting for Federal offices: President/VP, Senator, Representative. The states would determine what names are on it, same as now, but the structure of the ballot would be the same everywhere, and would be tested within an inch of its life. None of this nonsense where each state, and in some states each county, can have a totally untested ballot design that nobody else has, at least not for Federal offices.
And yet millions of people were able to navigate the fires of hell known as a ballot and successfully had their votes counted.
In any human endeavor there are rules. If a football player catches a 40 yard TD pass but his second foot ever so slightly touches the end line, then it is not a catch. Why? Isn’t that close enough? The catch was spectacular. It is not a catch because the agreed upon rules prior to the game say that it is not a catch.
Likewise, if the instructions say vote for one candidate and to fill in the bubble completely, it is not enough to circle the candidate, or put an X next to the candidate, or vote for the candidate and also write in his name.
In any other context, it would be clear and undisputed that if you did not follow simple instructions, then your vote is not counted. But in this context, Democrats demand that these “votes” are counted because this is their base: people on the government dole who cannot function in society and cannot follow rules. They need these votes so that they can be in power and take from the productive members of society and give their money to these people who cannot fill out a ballot.
And they typically get their way. They will find liberal judges who will rule that a November 16 deadline in the law really means November 21. They will want to rule that an X next to a candidate is a vote for that candidate because they glean the “intent of the voter” from that mark, even though it could just as easily mean “definitely not that guy.” We could argue back and forth about what that mark means, but if the voter wanted to vote for him, then fill in the damn bubble next to his name like the instructions say and how every scantron tabulates anything.
Why should the taxpayers have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to count the votes of a handful of people who cannot navigate a ballot? To elect Democrats?
That’s my point. If the problem was that there was a 3% undervote in Broward, but only 1% elsewhere, and we assume that 2% of people did not vote for the Senate race because they were blinded by a lower left ballot placement, then what do we do?
If they missed it, then we can recount for years and there will still be no vote recorded for that race. Do we just give the Dems a 2% bump in Broward?
In any event, 98% of the voters were able to look down and to the left and finally find a way to vote for their preferred Senate candidate. How much money and time should society invest in making these ballots idiot-proof so that the Dems can get as many votes as possible?
If you mean that Democrats don’t want to shit on people who are struggling, you’re right. One would hope that’d be a universal value in our nation.
Personally, I would rather have the poor who are struggling to make due (in a world where wealth is increasingly filtered towards the already super wealthy), and need some assistance from their fellow citizens, in my base than authoritarians and white nationalists. But to each their own I guess. For some reason, having white nationalists (and most other peddlers in hate) in the Republican base doesn’t seem to bother Republicans that much.