Today I voted by filling in little circles next to the candidates of my choice, then sliding the ballot into a machine that reads and tallies the little circles.
I remember voting in the '80s by pressing levers, which were counted and tallied.
How does any form, other then writing on a piece of paper, handle write in candidates? Is it shuffled into an “other” pile, which has to be hand tallied? Is it pretty much ignored, on the assumption that a write in isn’t going to win?
Here we don’t use a touchscreen but a display with a jog dial and serveral buttons (enter, next, previous, etc). For write ins you select “other” and then you can type out the name with the wheel and the enter key.
I’m not sure how misspellings or name variations are handled when tabulating results.
I’m a poll worker and I just finished recording the write-ins from the ballots cast in my precinct.
The machine you used is probably the same as ours. Does it sit on top of a big plastic bin? When you put your ballot through the machine, it was dumped into the bin. After the polls close, we open the bin, remove the ballots, count them to make sure that the count agrees with the number recorded on the machine. Then we go through them by hand looking for ballots with write-in votes. The machine also recorded ballots that had write-ins, and our hand count and the machine count need to agree. The write-ins – the names and number of votes each received – are recorded in a tally book which is turned in to the county auditor.
I don’t know for sure what happens after this. I suppose there’s some collating going on at the county and state level.
We had 177 ballots – two write-ins – one for Hillary Clinton and one for Ron Paul.