When doing a manual recount, look how, in less than two pages, many reasonable Dopers disagree with what a voter intended.
My thought is that if you can’t walk into a voting booth and fill in a bubble next to your candidate, knowing that there is help for the disabled, knowing that you can spoil your ballot, then maybe you are too stupid to have your vote counted.
Why should the state spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to decide if you meant to vote for Coleman, Franken, or the Lizard People? Follow the instructions or your vote doesn’t count.
I think there needs to be strict and as rigid a standard as possible in determining the “intent” of the voter. If it is remotely in doubt it gets tossed. So, from the link in that other thread I’d have zero problem determining intent on ballto #8 & 10 and it is silly to suggest it was anything else. I think it is important to count votes if at all possible.
#6 to me is borderline.
Again though the rules for what counts should be as explicit and rigid as possible. If it is not ABUNDANTLY clear what was intended and not just a nitpick then it counts.
Well…the state is spending so much money because the law requires them to do a recount and when it is so close every vote can really make a difference. So yeah, it is important.
And I agree starting the debate here again of which vote was intended for what is redundant and already being done in your linked thread. But as you said some few everyone was in agreement with. I think THAT should be the standard. When it is clear, as in those two cases, I think it is ok to decide you know the voter’s intent. Anything less than crystal clear intent should be tossed.
The problem is that we have an entire continuum of possible errors, from the thumbprint, to an eraser mark, to a small random mark on the page, to completely filling in two different bubbles, or no bubbles. Ultimately, you either have to have draconian rules, which are going to invalidate votes that a 5 year old could successfully count, or you have loosey goosey rules that require people to look at the page and decide using their own common sense, who the voter was or wasn’t voting for.
It doesn’t help that the candidates are challenging ballots on ridiculous grounds. Sure the guy completely filled in the bubble for my opponent, but there’s a tiny little dot near my bubble, so he obviously meant to vote for me. :rolleyes:
What happens if you have palsy? My Dad is one of the smartest guys I know, and his hands shake sometimes. Does that mean he shouldn’t get a vote?
Maybe you ought to think through some of the ramifications of your OP…
I said that there is help at the polls for a physical disability. And since you brought it up:
Florida spent millions of dollars for computer touchscreen voting. No marks or dimpled chads. A computer screen where you touch your choice.
Not good enough because old fuckers can’t use them, and there is no paper trail (like you should need it).
So, instead of the idiot-proof system, this year we use one where we take a pen and connect two lines. And that still causes problems.
Millions of dollars because people couldn’t press preforated paper in 2000, and can’t touch a computer screen in 2006. Now we have something worse than we started with. What will satisfy the “Let’s let everyone with a 15 IQ or higher” vote crowd?
The government should not impose any sort of intelligence (or sanity) test as a condition of voting, and I suspect that if they tried, it’d get shot down in the courts. Remember the Jim Crow era, when some states tried to impose literacy requirements on voters?
Also remember that what may seem easy to you may not seem easy to everyone else. Sure, that style of ballot is obvous to us, but what about folks who never took scan-tron tests growing up in school? Maybe the voter who put the check mark next to the name is a nonagenarian who hasn’t been inspired to vote since 1932, and just assumed that the format of the ballot hadn’t changed.
Intent of the voter is the only reasonable standard. If a significant number of voters’ votes do not correspond with their intentions, the process needs to be changed.
An anecdote about UIs:
First, I design electronic hardware, and I program User Interfaces, so I’m not a total idiot about these things. I was recently sent to Canada, and I went to the electronic check-in station. It’s your typical touch screen, which I had no trouble with, until it asked me to “swipe my passport.”
OK, where do I scan it?
Below the screen was a device labeled “scanner.” I tried using that, but it clearly didn’t work. I looked around and could not figure out how to do this. I finally caught the eye of a customer service rep, and she came over and slid my passport through a slot above the screen. I was stunned - I never would have thought to look there. She said “don’t feel bad, **NO ONE **can figure out how to use these machines.”
So, UI is everything - just because you have a fancy touch-screen voting system, that doesn’t mean that a person of average intelligence is going to be able to vote accurately on it, unless the UI is done correctly.
Also, a paper trail is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL. There is simply no way that I would trust the software or system in paperless voting. All computer science and security types agree.
First, the Jim Crow laws used the literacy tests as a means to an end. A white person wasn’t tested much at all, and a black person had to be a Rhodes Scholar. If the literacy tests had been fair, they may have passed muster.
But, I’m not even advocating that. All I am saying is that if they can’t take the time to follow instructions when they are printed on the ballot (and my poll worker even verbally told me how to vote) and if they can’t read, someone at the polling place will read it for them. Someone at the polling place will explain to them that they can spoil up to two ballots.
What else do we need? How much money are we willing to spend so that we can get contradictory information on whether or not a person wanted to vote for the Lizard People? That’s a far cry from Jim Crow.
Some ballots are kicked for overvotes. You vote straight party and then vote for someone in the party that you already covered. The intent is obvious and vote should count.
In Arizona, we insert the ballot into the scanner ourselves.
But, I trust the poll workers far more than the political parties, who have shown themselves capable of doing whatever it takes to win an election. The current state of electronic voting is laughably lax when it comes to security. I don’t want to see a Karl Rove type pay a hacker to infect the voting machines with a worm which changes the vote count by 1%, and then not be able to manually recount a physical ballot during a challenge.
I think this idea, while well-meaning, is actually impossible to implement. It would mean that each ballot would be different, and would need a key to decode.
I don’t get your first question. In my jurisdiction, I watch the poll worker put the ballot in (or put it in myself with them standing there). If it doesn’t work, I re-scan it or mark a new ballot and the old one’s destroyed.
Even if things work differently, the honesty of the poll workers doesn’t speak against a paper trail - it’s an immensely strong argument FOR it.
If there’s cheating with a scanned ballot, there’s a paper trail remaining as evidence that aids in discovery of the crime. If there’s cheating with a machine and no paper trail, there’s no way to know if a crime occurred. The dishonest poll worker would have to be destroying the ballots (and that is also something that’s easier to catch). In either case the crime could go undiscovered, but with ephemeral vote records it’s inherently undiscoverable.
Moreover, it doesn’t just take dishonesty to invalidate the electronic voting machine. A firmware bug in either system could occur, and without a backup method (like paper trail), it won’t get counted.
It wouldn’t be all that hard, actually. On each line, you put a bubble, a human-readable name, and a non-human-readable bar code that encodes the name. If a judge ever needs to decide on a ballot, the ballot is fed into a sleeve that covers the names, or the part with the names is torn off. He decides which bubble was intended, and feeds it back into a machine that can read the barcodes and tells the machine which bubble was intended.
This wouldn’t be foolproof: Covering or removing the names would also cover or remove disambiguating marks made in the same space as the name (such as the “No” written next to one candidate, or the one that was crossed out). But then, nothing is foolproof. And you could also mitigate that by giving the ballot to the voter in a similar sleeve that covers the names, except that the voter’s sleeve is transparent.
Changing the order on different ballots would also remove another potential source of bias, in that it’s possible that an undecided voter might be influenced by which candidate is listed first. If it wasn’t the same candidate who was always first, this effect wouldn’t be eliminated, but it would cease to systematically favor one candidate over another. Depending on how the order is varied, it could also eliminate bias from things similar to the Gore-Buchannon butterfly ballot problem.
I just do not understand people’s suspicions regarding electronic voting and I think it comes down to ignorance. The notion that the software can be tricked is as valid as the ballot boxes can be stuffed or the vote counters bought.
I believe electronic voting can be made much safer than paper voting and that eventually people will vote electronically from their homes and will laugh at the people who did not trust it. Just like today we laugh at those who thought early trains or automobiles or microwave ovens were evil.’
Electronic voting can be made as safe and reliable as anyone could want and you only need for the software to be open source and reviewed and approved by all the major parties.
The technology is there to guarantee the results to any level that you want. There is encryption, there are signatures, there are blind signatures, anything you could need.
Banks and big financial institutions move millions of dollars by wire completely safely.
People in many places are already voting online.
The fact that America cannot get a decent electronic voting system is not because it can’t be done but because elections, whether on paper or by any other system, are shoddily organized and no one could care less.