Hey, why should YOUR vote be counted?

Great Debates
41

I did use one, which I believe is very similar, 8 years ago. They are fairly common here in Denver. In addition, teh absentee ballots are punch ballots and you have to use a toothpick to knock out the chads. The instructions also tell you to remove all chads.

OK, after you take out the ballot it is tough to figure out which hole corresponds to what. But that has noting to do with the inability to punch the hole in the ballot. Sure, you might put the stylus in the wrong hole, and it woul d be tough to tell.

But that issue is entirely different that the issue of whether you a) put the stylus through the ballot or b) failed to clean off the chads.

42

The problems are these: When you’re not at home with your little toothpick, you’re in the voting booth (with a line forming behind you, so you’re conscious of not wanting to make other people wait too long), you slip the ballot behind a plastic sheild, and use a stylus to punch the card. but you can’t see the card when you’re punching. you don’t necessarily know if you’ve gotten the ballot in the correct position.

If the ballot isn’t in the correct position, then the itty bitty hole that you’re punching through doesn’t correspond to the center of the chad, and may miss the mark at punching it out plus you’re voting in a booth where hundreds of other votes have been done, and all those little chads may be stuck up in there (remember the guy confessing that although they were supposed to clean out those chads after every election, they hadn’t been cleaned in eight years which also included union elections as well as state, local and national ones???)

So, if the ballot’s in the wrong place, you may be hitting the top center instead of the middle of the chad, which wouldn’t then dislodge the whole thing, and if there was sufficient build up of chads, might not have even poked through hard enough to dislodge even a corner of it, hence the dreaded pregnant or dimpled chad.

sheesh. See, they developed these terms long before this election. (I used those systems for 21 years of voting)

43

A few questions:

  1. If the card is mis installed (which is still voter error, no?) how much pressure does it take to puncture the paper?

  2. if the card is mis-installed and the voter punches a dimple that is nto on the chad, How can you tell teh original position of the chad to tell who the voter voted for? E.G, if it was 1/4" off the dimples might show up on candidates that the voter didn’t want to vote for.

  3. if the card is mis-aligned, then how does the chad get dimpled? Wouldn’t the dimple be between chads?

  4. If this process is so hard, why is the percentage of dimpled chads so low. Isn’t it like 300 out of 200,000? It would seem to me that it would be higher if it were so difficult.

44

There’s been a whole lot of discussion about how much dislodgement of the chad is a vote, how dimpled chads should not count, etc. But I think all of those who have been obsessed with those definitions are missing the point. The entire subject was raised by Bush’s people as a smokescreen, to try to discredit manual counts entirely, and we know why, and it worked. I’m disappointed that so many people on this board, who are presumably computer-literate, let themselves be sidetracked into the subject. The old farts on the USSC at least have an excuse.

45

I’m glad ElvisL1ves puts us back on track here. I’m going to go back to what Bricker said in the OP to get us back on track, and take it from there:

To which I responded:

Which produced the following mea culpa from Bricker:

This gets us to a fundamental point in looking at this concept of ‘legal’ votes. There is no state that uses punch card ballots which requires a completely detached chad for a vote to be legal. This includes the much-maligned state of Florida.

The instruction quoted by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is printed on ballots and ballot instructions at the direction of the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is required to approve electro-mechanical voting methods such as punch card ballots read by card readers (Florida Statutes §101.5605(1)). The Secretary of State approves the form of ballots used for such elections (§101.5609(8)), including the printing on such ballots (subsection ©). Instructions on how to operate the voting device are to be posted and given to the voter before he/she enters the booth (§101.5611). Nowhere in this extensive legislative scheme for dealing with ballots of the type at issue or any other type of ballot, is there a definition of what constitutes a valid vote when utilizing a punch card ballot.

The ‘instructions’ to the voters now become clear as to their part in the process. The Secretary of State (probably someone WAY prior to Ms. Harris) has approved punch card ballots read by card readers. These reading machines cannot accurately read ballots where the ‘chad’ of paper is not completely detached. To try to make certain that as few votes as possible end up unrecorded by the machines, the voters are instructed to try and make sure that they do not leave undetached chads. The unstated consequence of doing so is that the vote may not be tabulated by the counting machine.

It is poor logic to conclude that this means that a ballot on which there is a chad not completely removed is a ballot with no legal vote. No provision of the law so holds. Indeed, the only provision in Florida law that even discusses the concept of ‘legal’ vote states that “No vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter as determined by the canvassing board.” (§101.5614(5), discussing the manual tabulation and or duplication of 'defective or damaged ballots intended to be read by electro-mechanical tabulation equipment). As the Supreme Court of Florida noted, in a part of their opinion not invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States, this standard is the standard by which Florida law determines whether an attempt to vote will be considered a ‘legal’ vote.

This standard is not inconsistent with the laws of other states. I will cite two examples. Texas law states the following relevant to the legality of punch card ballot votes:

Michigan law states:

These two examples provide us with evidence that, while the standard for what is ‘legal’ to count varies, it is always contemplated by states using punch card ballots that some chads will not be completely removed, yet some such votes should be counted.

With this understanding of the facts, it becomes highly ingenuous to assert that the voters in Florida should not have had their ‘votes’ counted if they failed to completely detach the chads. It was extremely egregious of the Chief Justice of the nation’s highest court to misuse the instructions printed on the ballot not as they were intended (a warning to voters on how to make sure they did get their vote counted), but as some sort of legal authority on what constituted a ‘legal’ vote in the state of Florida. I note with some satisfaction that only the most rabidly ‘conservative’ members of the court were willing to sign this piece of silly reasoning.

Please, Mr. Zambezi, no more nonsense about voters failing to do what they had to. Many of them did, and their legal votes remain untallied, thanks to a flawed process that got much to complicated to unravel in large part to assertions like this that had no basis in fact or law, but which sounded like common sense.

And Rick, I share your pain over the failing of Mr. Chief Justice Rhenquist. I would have expected such silliness from Ms. Justice O’Connor instead.

46
47

Sorry about that, all. My reply got cut off for some reason.

Deserve? In my opinion, no. As has been already argued, voting is both a privilege and a responsibility. The right to vote has been extended to the people (well, people over the age of 18), but it is still the voter’s responsibility to register to vote and to vote properly. This includes making sure the card is punched, the vote is correctly registered, etc. The voter is responsible for casting his ballot in a manner that conforms to election codes. I am not permitted to drive on the freeway if I do not obey traffic regulations, regardless of whether I fully understand traffic regulations or not; why should I be permitted to vote if I do not obey voting regulations?

However, as far as Florida is concerned, this is a moot point (I’m not sure about the other states; for obvious reasons, I’ve had the opportunity to skim FL election codes). The Florida State Legislature has decreed that, by law, a voter who fails to follow voting instructions does in fact deserve to have his vote counted.

From Florida Statute Title IX, Chapter 102, Section 166: Protest of election returns; procedure.

*(7) Procedures for a manual recount are as follows:

(a) The county canvassing board shall appoint as many counting teams of at least two electors as is necessary to manually recount the ballots. A counting team must have, when possible, members of at least two political parties. A candidate involved in the race shall not be a member of the counting team.

(b) If a counting team is unable to determine a voter’s intent in casting a ballot, the ballot shall be presented to the county canvassing board for it to determine the voter’s intent.*

48

Caldazar you should review the post I made just before yours. It is incorrect to assert that a ‘correct’ vote in Florida, or any other state that uses punch card ballots, requires a fully detached chad.

Once we get past this unfortunate concept, the rest of the issues begin to fall in place pretty quickly.

Issue #1: Is an attempt to vote that does not fully punch out a chad a legal vote? Yes.

Issue #2: Who gets to decide whether the vote is ‘legal’? The county canvassing board is the ultimate arbiter under Florida law.

Issue #3: By what standard do they decide if the vote is ‘legal’? They are required to determine if the ballot shows a “clear indication of intent to vote.”

Issue #4: Do they have any sub-standards by which this can be determined? None that exist statewide; some counties using the punch card ballots have, in the past, had rules for how to determine if an attempt to vote will be counted as a legal vote, e.g. Palm Beach County, which had such a standard in 1990. There is nothing to prevent the counties from adopting such ‘rules’ or ‘standards’ on the fly as they deal with an election.

Issue #5: Does this violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Well, seven out of the nine justices thought so, including Justice Breyer, appointed by President Clinton. It was clear that the standards used to determine the validity of possible votes differed from county to county. It was not clear that this had made an actual significant difference in the numbers of votes found to be legal (although Broward County did ‘recover’ about three times as many ‘legal’ votes as did Dade County, it was never shown that this was a statistically significant figure). Although they did not so hold, since they didn’t have to (thanks in large measure to the stupidity of the Florida Supreme Court which failed to order a recount of ALL ‘undervotes’ by the ‘standard’), it appears that a majority of the Court felt that the application of the standard, without some statewide sub-standards, was per se unconstitutional.

Issue #6: Could a constitutionally permissible standard for determining a ‘legal’ vote be created to deal with incompletely detached chads? Yes, and Michigan has an example, as quoted above, requiring at least two detached corners.

Issue #7: What about perforated, but undetached chads? To assume that a perforation of a chad occurred for some reason other than the attempt to push a stylus through the chad is seemingly silly. One might argue that people will play games with whether or not the chad is actually perforated, but one can argue the same silliness about whether a corner is actually ‘detached’. It is still a pretty objective standard.

Issue #8: When, if ever, could dimpled chads be counted as legal votes? I doubt that any constitutionally acceptable standard for counting such potential votes could be crafted, unless the counting was done by one person or group of people for the entire jurisdiction voting (e.g., the whole State of Florida). While I can certainly conceive of valid reasons why a voter might fail to perforate or detach a chad while attempting to vote, and since we have determined that some incomplete attempts at chad removal are to be counted, it would be churlish and venal to insist that someone who makes a legitimate attempt to vote, but fails to detach or perforate the chad should have the vote rejected solely because the person “didn’t follow the instructions.” I’ve voted using those cards, and you can’t see the card while you vote; you don’t necessarily know what chad you should have removed, and while it can be argued that failing to remove a hanging chad is voter stupidity, how the hell is the voter expected to notice that his attempt to vote failed because the chad is ‘dimpled’ or ‘pregnant’??

However, one can also conceive of a variety of reasons why a ballot could contain any number of stray dents and dimples that don’t mean that the person has attempted to vote. Thus, looking at any one dimple or pregnancy and trying to decide, “yes, this one is a vote, that one is not” inherently involves subjective judgment, which is where the Florida statute ended up being unconstitutional. The best one could manage would be to establish that a pattern of such dimples on a ballot which seems substantially undervoted should be counted (obviously this means error in use of the machine, not some unrelated error). But making that be a completely or mostly objective standard would be difficult.

If they ever recount Florida, tabulating all detached chads, or chads that are perforated, but without counting pregnant or dimpled chads, likely they will find that Mr. Bush won. Does this mean that the plurality of Florida voters entering the booth who attempted to vote for a presidential candidate attempted to vote for him? Not necessarily, indeed most probably not, given the obvious screw-up in Palm Beach County with the ‘butterfly’ ballot, a screw-up that simply can’t be rectified legally. But as some have pointed out here, we can’t achieve perfection with our efforts, we should just try to be fair about attempting to achieve perfection.

49

DSyoungesq, if this were an issue in teh normal realm of physical reality, one would expect that the first step taken would have been to conduct some experiments. Forexample, one would take random unpunched ballots and pull some random machines and then perform tests on the amount of pressure needed to punch a chad, to punch an area away from the chad, etc. One would also test the possibility that the machine would fill up enough to prevent punching the chad out.

The law can say what it wants, but what I am arguing about is how realistic it is that someone would not be able to punch a hole in the ballot.

The truth of the matter is that since we can’t tie any ballot to any person or machine, it is impossible to tell whether teh voter tried to punch out the ballot and failed or did something else.

I think that the miniscule ration of dimpled ballots to punched ballots speaks volumes. Something like .2% of the people had problems. I think that says more about the ballot than the Michigan statute.

50

DSYoungEsq,

Yes, I understand that state law does not require a fully punched chad or a strict adherence to the instructions about punching one’s card completely for a vote to count; the canvassing board is supposed to rule on voter intent in such situations. In that sense, the response to “Hey, why should YOUR vote be counted?” is “Because the law says so.”

But, I read the OP “Does a voter who fails to follow that instruction deserve to have his vote counted?” to mean, not “Does the law entitle his vote to be counted?” (Yes, it does), but rather “SHOULD his vote count?” And my response to that particular question is, in my opinion, no, for the reasons I previously mentioned. Voting is a responsibility. The rules and regulations governing the election process have already been laid out (well, most of them, anyway… the whole issue regarding standards for the determination of intent and all), and it’s up to the voters to adhere to these regulations. I would argue that exercising one’s right to vote is no different than exercising any other right or privilege granted by law: to exercise such a right, you must first meet certain requirements and then you must follow the rules associated with exercising such a right. Either that, or demonstrate that the requirements or rules associated with exercising such a right are unlawful or unfair in some fashion, and work to have the rules changed.

While I don’t know if Mr. Zamezi’s statistic of “0.2% of the people had problems” is accurate or not, it does strike me that that a very small portion of the total voter turnout had complaints relating to the method of casting one’s vote (punch card, machine, whatever), which indicates (at least to me) that the majority of people did not believe that the requirements or rules of the election process were unfair. Granted, not every voice is necessarily heard, but I fail to see how it’s unreasonable to require a voter to double-check his vote to ensure that the votes on the ballot correspond to his intent. Since voting in this country is done by private ballot, we aren’t permitted to assign election officials to watch over voters and ask, “By the marks on this ballot, you indicated that you want to vote <this way>. Is this truly your intent?” So it falls to the voter to ensure that his intent is clearly shown on the ballot.

51

Good lord, do I really have to explain how difficult this is – again???

Please do us all a favor and scroll up!

52

and

But according to DSYoungEsq’s post, a voter with a “hanging chad” (e.g.) would (by a resonable interpretation of the law) have been following the rules in the state of Florida. So why should their vote not be counted? Especially when hand-counting ballots and the intent is clear? And even if the law says “the voter must check for hanging chads” and the voter failed to do so, I argue (as I did above) that deliberately setting aside their vote is elevating the mechanical process of voting over the purpose of voting, which is to determine the choice made by the individual.

I also make the difference between “should the voter have a right to demand that their vote be counted” and “should their vote count”? To repeat my example in a previous post, if a poster circles names on a ballot (yes Shayna, I know that on some punched card ballots the name does not appear, but on the paper ballots I use, the name of the candidate appears next to the hole that you punch to make your selection) instead of punching a hole, I don’t think s/he has a right to DEMAND that their vote be counted, but deliberately ignoring their vote in a handcount would be ridiculous.

53

You both are missing the point, Caldazar and Mr. Zambezi.

Caldazar, you still fail to place the ‘instruction’ in its proper place in the scheme of things. The OP phrased its question on the assumption that the ‘instruction’ was a notice to the voter of what he had to do to make his vote ‘correct’ (I’ll eschew the term ‘legal’ for this). You, too, in your reasoning, make that assumption, when you say, “to exercise such a right, you must first meet certain requirements and then you must follow the rules associated with exercising such a right.” This presupposes that the full and complete detachment of a chad is a ‘requirement’; it is not, nor was it ever.

For your review, then, I ask you to contrast the two following sets of ‘instructions’:

Clearly, faced with the latter instruction, assuming it were a true and accurate expression of the law, one would have little room to argue that chads not completely detached should be counted. This would be much more analogous to the ‘overvote’ situation, or the difficulty encountered by the voters in Palm Beach County who apparently voted for Mr. Buchanan when they intended to vote for Mr. Gore; we can be quite reasonable in denying them a ‘remedy’ for their failure to ‘correctly’ vote. But I again submit that the former instruction, if it is merely advisory and not a legal requirement, does not lead one to the conclusion that a voter who fails to follow the advisory instruction doesn’t deserve to complain when their vote is not counted.

As to Mr. Zambezi, you will first note that I stated that, under the law as laid down by the Supreme Court, I don’t think dimpled chads CAN be allowed to count, nor is it wise to attempt such a tabulation because it raises the strong appearance of potential for abuse, although as to THAT argument I do feel that the eventual review of any such determination by a court of law could correct that possibility.

But as to whether or not the attempts to vote that resulted in dimpled chads should be counted assuming that it would not violate constitutional law, your argument fails to take into account actual fact. We might wonder how someone could fail to detach a chad, but application of ‘common sense’ often fails to predict actual facts. Fact 1: This was a presidential election; very few people go to the polls and fail to vote on this issue in such an election. Fact 2: In counties without punch card ballots, the number of undervotes was substantially lower, both numerically and as a proportion of the total ballots cast. Fact 3: A significant number of ‘undervotes’ resulted in counties where punch card ballots were cast, ‘significant’ here defined by the fact that the result of counting them might well have resulted in a changed election determination. Fact 4: A substantial number of such undervotes had marks on them that appeared to represent the impact of a stylus on one of the chads which, if removed, would have been counted by the machine as a vote for one of the presidential candidates. Given these facts, we see that, while Florida certainly did not intend to disenfranchise its populace by use of punch card ballots, it apparently managed to so do. This conclusion is buttressed by evidence that some states have totally removed from their electoral process such methods of voting.

So, whether it seems sensible to you or not, it appears that a significant number of ballots with attempted votes that registered as something less than fully detached chads occured, including dimpled chads. Given that this problem occurred, given that the voter was not ‘required’ to fully remove chads, only advised to do so, we reach the conclusion that, if it were legally possible to count such votes, such a count should be attempted.
A much better assertion that results from application of your logic would be that the Secretary of State failed her duties to the people of Florida by failing to properly test the ability of the voting method to properly record an attempt to vote, to say nothing of the obvious failure of the vote counting equipment to properly count ‘legal’ ballots as they are defined under Florida law. See, e.g. Florida Statutes, §101.5606(4). I think it likely that Florida will substantially modify its reliance on such systems in the near future.

54

DSY:

for clarity, I am not arguing about hanging chads where the person actually punched out the ballot. Throwing thos in with dimpled chads serves to augment the total number of “undervotes”. I simply do not believe that it is possible to dimple a chad while trying to vote…or at least, I have never seen any investigation into the physics of it. ANd that is the issue. IF it is not possible to dimple a chad, or if it takes gross incompetenct to fail to poke the ballot, I say “tough” to those voters.

But hey,maybe we have different views n the level of responsibility of the citizens.

55

This is not true. I voted absentee in Florida. I get the same ballot as everyone else but I don’t get the machine to slide the ballot into. So, how do you figure I managed to vote. The chads are numbered. And each candidate has a NAME and NUMBER. For example Bush was #3…Gore was #5. Therefore if you are not voting absentee, you are suppose to make sure the chad marked by your candidates number is punched.

56

Additionally,

The presidential candidates being first are real easy to find. It’s the third and 5th chad from the top in the left hand column. Shayna is mischaracterizing what the ballot looks like. I have first hand exoerience as a FLORIDA punch card voter. The numbers are not in a confusing array, but in a logical series.

57

By the way, Rush is a citizen of West Palm. He voted with this ballot before it ever became an issue.

And he is no longer fat.

58

Yes, I understand this. This is why, in an earlier post, I asserted that, “by law, a voter who fails to follow voting instructions does in fact deserve to have his vote counted,” citing one FL election law dealing with the determination of voter intent as an example. LEGALLY, should a person’s vote be counted even if, in casting his vote, he violates the instructions printed on the ballot? Yes, so long as the manner in which he casts his vote is permitted by law.

My subsequent posts dealt with answering the OP as it was presented:

“Does a voter who fails to follow that instruction deserve to have his vote counted?”

“Should a voter who fails to follow the above instruction be heard to later complain about being disenfranchised?”

LEGALLY, I believe the answer is yes. IN MY OPINION, I believe the answer should be no. In other words, I take issue with laws requiring counters and canvassing boards to determine voter intent in such situations when voters fail to adhere to the instructions printed on the ballot. I hold the position that responsibilities pertaining to issues of voter intent should fall first and foremost on the shoulders on the voter and that the voting instructions printed on the ballot should be considered a requirement. Again, I understand this is not what the law states. I disagree with the law. The OP, as I read it, is asking for a value judgement. “If you don’t follow the instructions on the card, should you be permitted to complain?” No, in my opinion, because you should have to accept the burden of responsibility in ensuring that your vote is marked in such a way that minimizes the possibility of machine or manual counting error. To me, that means, punching out chads fully, checking your work, and the like. Voting is both a priveledge and a responsibility.

Yes, I realize that if this method were adopted, people who made errors in voting would not have their votes counted and their voices heard. But it would avoid the endless recounting and litigation that has ensued over the past weeks.

Re-reading my posts, I realize that I did not make the distinction between my (admittedly non-professional) legal assessment and my views (and reasons for my views) about the way I believe the system should be. At least, I did not make the distinction clearly enough.

Shayna

It was not my intention to trivialize the difficulty in casting one’s vote using the punch card system you described; my apologies to you if I did so or if I insulted you in any fashion. I had read your description of the punch card ballots, and I do agree that ensuring that one’s vote was properly cast using this method of voting is difficult, or at least potentially more difficult that with other methods employed on election day. However, my point is that this difficult voting method was already reviewed and approved before the election. On election day, the system was in place. At that point, I feel it is the voter’s responsibility to ensure that his intent is clearly shown (again, yes, I understand that this is not what the law states), no matter how difficult or arduous the task may be. I too object to the use of the punch card system employed in various FL districts, and hope they will not be used in the future. But the time to object to the voting system is before the election begins, not during the election or after voting has been completed.

59

I’m not a Florida voter, but Nevada uses a similar or the same system. I believe that the people complaining about the difficulty of the punch cards, are exagerrating a bit. The punch card is a pretty snug fit in the slot, it would be pretty hard to get it mis-aligned horizontally, and if you push in down all the way, there are a couple of studs that align it correctly vertically. Once you get to your choices, you poke the stylus through. The stem is about 2 inches long, IIRC. If it goes all the way through to the head of the stylus, you can be pretty sure you made some sort of hole in the card, even if it’s only a hanging chad, or swinging door, which can be detectecd by looking at the card. If it doesn’t go all the way to through, don’t you think you should complain to the poll workers?

Although, I may be overqualified to comment on simplicity, since my VCR has the correct time and date, and I can even set it to record the right show.

60

Caldazar, if what you are saying is that a voter, with a warning reminding him to do something he is not obligated to do by law, but which will help him achieve his goal can’t complain if he fails his goal, well, I would concede that his ability to feel legitimately shortchanged by the result should be less. In that assessment, we would agree.

But the OP didn’t phrase it quite that way. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not the instruction was validly written, the issue offered for discussion was whether or not such a person should be upset at having been ‘disenfranchised.’ Now it is, in my mind, a different question to discuss how one feels about the fact that any relatively trivial goal is not met because of failure to follow instructions from discussing how one should feel because one’s attempt to vote is not counted. Voting is a basic right, or, as the Supreme Court calls it, a ‘fundamental’ right. It is the lynchpin of our society, along with the associated freedom to speak our minds without fear of being repressed from or for doing so. So, in my mind, a voter who doesn’t follow ‘instructions’, but who manages none-the-less to produce a ballot that can be counted without use of a Ouija® board has some right to expect that someone will attempt to do so, if it becomes necessary because of the closeness of a given race.

Voting isn’t a school test, it isn’t an exercise in trying to follow instructions; it is an attempt to make sure government runs as the citizens of our country wish it to. It would be (and in the past has been) all too easy for those in power to attempt to stay in power using all sorts of strategems designed to reduce participation at the polls by those who oppose them. Yes, obviously some level of voter responsibility exists; for this reason no one seriously claims that those who voted for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach County should have their votes switched to Albert Gore because they mistakenly punched the second hole from the top rather than the hole to which the second arrow on the left pointed. Nor would a voter be heard to claim that his vote for Mr. Gore should be counted as a vote for Mr. Bush because his wife explained to him at home afterwards that he really is a Republican at heart and should have so voted. But to disenfranchise a voter because of a failure to follow instructions, when a countable result is nevertheless produced is a more serious punishment than I think the situation merits.

I might add, Florida law agrees with me, as espoused by the Supreme Court of that state in numerous cases, most recently (before this election) Beckstrom v. Volusia County Canvassing Board, 707 So.2d 720 (1998).