"Intent of the voter" is a foolish and unworkable standard

[Shagnasty]

The problem with voter disenfranchisement is far more reaching than just poor ballet design. Poor ballet design potentially disenfranchised thousands or tens of thousands of voters in Florida and in other states.

What about the disenfranchisement of the millions of voters like myself that did not even show up to vote? I woke up on Super Tuesday and just plain did not feel like going to the polls. In fact, I could not even remember where I was supposed to go if I wanted to vote. I was torn on who I was going to vote for but I am pretty sure that I would have had “intent” when the time came just like everyone else.

What is going to be done to make sure that people like me have our voice counted the next time around? I too am sick of being disenfranchised by the system.

[dublos]

mavpace

You disenfranchized youself, so to avoid this in the future, get off your lazy butt and go out and vote
You could have motivated yourself sufficiently to discover where to vote, likely up to an hour before the polls closed in your area.

As to the OP…

I prefer those ballots that simply spit back out if the ballot is incorrectly filled out (I don’t know if it allows undervotes to pass unquestioned). Seems pretty simple and straightforward to tell me, the voter at that moment, that I screwed up, and please go back and do it right.

-Doug

[RTFirefly]

Rick, I question the need to ‘let passions cool’ before (re-)raising this issue. Even in the midst of the five-week Battle for Florida, passions never ran so high here that they precluded rational argument. And since we were still in the thick of things, it was easier, then, for those of us involved to locate and link to the thread where we’d just responded to an idea, rather than having to either do extensive searches, or restate our ideas from scratch.

Also, I think you’ve got not one question here, but three:

1. Should we do everything reasonably possible to minimize the opportunity for voter and machine error in the future?

2. Once we’ve done so, will there ever be any situations where hand-examining ballots to discern the ‘intent of the voter’ is better than not doing so?

And, inevitably:

3. Did it make more sense than not to consider the intent of the voter in the election just concluded?

Responses:

1. is pretty much a given: of course we should. We should, as you have suggested, have universal standards of reliability for voting systems’ ability to translate voter intent into machine-readable marks. If voters overvote or undervote, the machines they feed their ballots into should inform them of their likely error, and give them the opportunity to correct it.

2. If we do what we seem to have the political willingness to do right now, and fix the mechanics of our voting systems nationwide, it goes without saying that we should drastically reduce the number of elections that are in any sort of doubt by the following morning.

But as long as there is any potential for a combination of human and machine error, there will be ballots that are unclear to the machine. In some cases, the apparent margin of victory will be substantially smaller than the number of such ballots. Should we not look at them with human eyes, to see what they say?

For instance, here’s my ideal voting system for 2004:

At the voting booth, you find a monitor, mouse and keypad, and laser printer. The monitor offers you a choice of candidates for each office; after you indicate a choice with the mouse or keypad, it asks: “You are voting for Joe Shmoe for U.S. Senate. Are you sure this is who you want to vote for?” If you don’t want to vote for anyone, it’ll let you proceed, but only after asking you once if you really don’t want to vote for anyone; if you vote for multiple candidates where that’s not allowed, it reminds you that you can only vote for one, and so forth.

Once you’ve given your voting preferences (or declined to vote) in all contests and referenda, it laser-prints you a ballot with the offices, and the candidates you are voting for, in bold caps. You can look that over, and if it’s not satisfactory, you can start over again. If you’re happy with what it says you’ve done, you feed it into the optical character-reader (OCR) machine, which is the action by which you actually vote.

Specially marked booths would have pictures of the candidates, and give instructions in a variety of languages. Others would have a keyboard to allow write-in votes.

Will this screw up often? No.
Will it screw up sometimes? Yes.
Will there on occasion be something that the eye can make sense of, but the machine can’t? Sure. A printer might print weakly, the machine might fail to read it, but a person might find the printing faint but clear. In this hypothetical case, the “intent of the voter” can clearly be seen, just not by the machine.

But such a system would reduce, by a couple of orders of magnitude, the number of elections worth contesting. And we’d probably never again have a Presidential election hanging on chads, or their latter-day equivalent. With any luck, the system would be reliable enough for us to go to direct election of the President, if we choose. (I leave for other threads the issue of whether we should, or shouldn’t, for other reasons.)

But one can never exclude the possibility of having human inspection of individual ballots being advantageous in terms of increasing the accuracy of an election result, IMO.

3. Did it make sense to consider the intent of the voter in this past election? I sure think so, and I think I argued my case pretty convincingly. For instance, in Palm Beach County, we now know that the Gore/Buchanan overvotes voted something like 10-1 for the Democrat in the Senate race. The problem with the ‘intent of the voter’ business was its restriction to a one-ballot-at-a-time approach, and its resulting failure to take the statistical measure of the intent of large groups such as this.

I think I’ll just leave it at that one example, rather than reopen the Battle for Florida. Hopefully, no major election in this country will ever again turn on the sorts of circumstances that our recent Presidential election did.

[Zebra]

Bricker

What if the person follows instructions and does not realize that their little hole puncher did not completly mark their vote?
What about ‘equal protection under the law’?

If a state does not supply the same voteing machines across the state does it not violate the peoples rights? If in one county the machines are old and not repaired as recomended by the maker and in another county there are new machines that have a smaller margin of error isn’t the state violating their citizens rights?

There are lost votes caused by the machines not by user error.

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by Doctor Jackson *

After all, we don’t just declare a contract void and meaningless because it’s ambiguous, do we?

Actually, that IS a reason to delcare a contract (or law) invalid.

But - let’s be real - how often does that happen?

Twenty years ago, I was a paralegal for a law firm that did more than its share of civil litigation. The linchpin of most of these cases was a contract that contained sufficient ambiguity so that the parties viewed its obligations differently - into many millions of dollars’ difference, usually.

I don’t recall a decision in any of these cases where a court declared a contract null and void; it almost always resolved the ambiguity in favor of one of the parties.

I apologize for the digression. Back to the main argument.

[milroyj]

people with less education (and thus less experience with ballot-like instruments, e.g fill-in-the-oval forms).

I wonder how much this is a factor. Isn’t school attendance mandatory up to a certain age/grade? Don’t all states at least have some sort of required school achievement tests that use the same format?

There are two groups I can think of that might be more unfamiliar with “scantron” type forms, immigrants and older citizens. For immigrants, if voting rights and responsibilites are not part of the citizenship classes/test they should be. For people who went to school prior to the advent of such forms,

Pre-election publicity that clearly and unambiguously shows how to fill out your ballot

as Rick stated, is important. Also, they could have a scanner at the voting booth that would immediately tell the voter if an error (undervote/overvote) has been made. The voter would then have the opportunity to correct or submit a new ballot, with the help of the poll workers as necessary.

After all, it was a federal vote, why not mandate the ballot on a federal level? :shrug:

Except it wasn’t a federal vote. There were fifty individual elections for the electors representing each state. The whole Electoral College is a debate left to another thread, however, I doubt a federally mandated ballot would be constitutional, in that the perogative of choosing said electors is left with the Legislatures of the States, not the U.S. Congress.

[minty_green]

Thank you for the response on my behalf, RTFirefly. A contract may be declared null and void on the VERY long shot that there was no true meeting of the minds, but a contract will NEVER be declared void simply because the intent of the parties is ambiguous. That’s nothing more than Contracts 101.

And milroyj, I guarantee that a uniform national ballot for federal elections would be constitutional. Congress has great power to enforce voting rights under the 14th and 15th Amendments. For instance, that’s why literacy tests for voters, even though constitutionally permissible, have been legally prohibited by Congress.

[milroyj]

I don’t think so, mintygreen. As Article II, Section I provides:

“Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.”

Also from Bush v. Gore:

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States…”

Voting rights, smoting rights.

[minty_green]

Those quotes are out of context, milroyj. Read that section in Bush v. Gore again and you’ll find these statements:

When the state legislature vests the right to vote for President in its people, the right to vote as the legislature has prescribed is fundamental; and one source of its fundamental nature lies in the equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity to each voter.

Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another. It must be remembered that “the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or illusion of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectivelt as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise” (citations omitted).

It also ought to be self-evident that if the federal government was powerless to regulate presidential and other federal elections, the Supreme Court never could have stepped in to correct Florida in the first place. You may even wish to take a look at the Voting Rights Act one of these days.

So do whatever you want with your smoting rights, but the feds do indeed have the power to regulate presidential elections.

[matt_mcl]

*Originally posted by rjung *
Every voter has an intent; the trick is to have a voting mechanism that properly captures that intent. Having a human tabulate votes may be the best way possible, because the tabulator can reject ambiguity on-the-fly, but it isn’t practical for various reasons. **

Um, your neighbour to the north had an election around about the same time you did, and we hand counted every ballot. There’s nothing too difficult about it, and I’m sure that the most powerful country in the world can think of a way to get their ballots hand-counted.

[pldennison]

*Originally posted by matt_mcl *
**

*Originally posted by rjung *
Every voter has an intent; the trick is to have a voting mechanism that properly captures that intent. Having a human tabulate votes may be the best way possible, because the tabulator can reject ambiguity on-the-fly, but it isn’t practical for various reasons. **

Um, your neighbour to the north had an election around about the same time you did, and we hand counted every ballot. There’s nothing too difficult about it, and I’m sure that the most powerful country in the world can think of a way to get their ballots hand-counted. **

Um, our neighbor to the north also has a bit less than one-tenth our population, as well as a very different form of government.

Compare and contrast: In Canada in 2000, 63% of 20.4 million eligible voters actually voted, resulting in 12.9 million votes cast. For the record, there are more than 9.9 million people in Los Angeles County, Calif., alone.

In the U.S. in 2000, 51% of 205 million eligible voters actually voted, resulting in 105 million votes cast. Nearly ten times as many as in Canada. In fact, our votes cast amount to three times your total population.

Furthermore, it would appear that Canada hadpolling problems of its own.

I know you’re proud of being Canadian, and the American voting problem is certainly worth solving, but let’s not just be smug and ignore the sheer magnitude of difference in the numbers of votes and the number of state and local races, hmm?

[ElvisL1ves]

matt, coupla points I would have thought would be pretty obvious:

1. Only a few ridings were actually close enough for a more-accurate hand recount to actually matter, and there weren’t enough of those to cast any doubt on there being a solid Liberal win and a continuation of the Chretien administration. That was even pretty clear well BEFORE the election, right?

2. There was an intense legal effort by one of the parties to PREVENT the performance, completion, and certification of a full manual recount in Florida. There’s no question in the minds of most people, except mainly for a key 5 on the Supreme Court, that a good-faith effort to do it could have succeeded in a timely manner.

Fair enough?

[kabbes]

Er, pld - 10 times as many votes and 10 times as many people to count 'em? Doesn’t seem too tricky to me.

I believe they are handcounted in the UK too. A good old-fashioned X-in-the-box.

pan

[pldennison]

*Originally posted by kabbes *
**Er, pld - 10 times as many votes and 10 times as many people to count 'em? Doesn’t seem too tricky to me.
**

So, what, you want to make every schmoe on the street an election counting official?

[wring]

*Originally posted by pldennison *
**
So, what, you want to make every schmoe on the street an election counting official? **

and this would differ… how??? ( )

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by Bricker *
BUT - having bent over backwards to make it easy, I say that we should judge the ballot by the objective standard of what the ballot says, not the subjective “intent of the voter” standard.

I am suggesting that the line be drawn strictly: a ballot must clearly and unambiguously indicate a candidate, per ballot marking standards agreed-upon in advance of the election.

If this is an unworkable standard, let’s hear why – but let’s avoid the straw man of eliminating voters entirely, which never formed part of my argument.

The problem is, no matter what system of voting is used, situations are sure to come up where (a) the machine can’t read the ballot, (b) for reasons that weren’t anticipated ahead of time, and © in which the intent of the voter is unambiguous on at least some ballots.

I have faith that technology steadily improves. But I don’t have faith that any technology will be perfect. At the end of the day, I am unwilling to completely cede the art of making judgment calls and fine distinctions to a machine.

The best way to prevent a repeat of the monstrosity we have just been through is to minimize the number of ballots where voter intent might need discerning, and to restrict, as much as possible, the scope of any call riding on voter intent.

The way to do the first is by improving the technology of voter systems. The way to do the second is by getting away from ‘winner-take-all’ electoral-vote schemes. (Legally, the states can do this. The politics of the matter would require a Constitutional amendment, though.) If just a few electoral votes had been riding on the recent dispute, rather than 25, the election wouldn’t have ridden on the outcome.

[Milossarian]

**I know everyone agrees that somehow, a line must be drawn – if a ballot purported to vote for “that guy with the red tie,” I hope everyone would agree that it’s a spoiled ballot…

**
Incorrect assumption. I spent about two months in here knocking heads with Gore supporters who would make no such concession about a line being drawn.

In their utopia, no one is personally responsible for casting their vote correctly. If they intend to vote for a particular someone, essentially, it doesn’t matter what they do or don’t do. Their “vote” should be counted.

Can I get a :rolleyes: ?

matt: Your country has - what? - one-twentieth of our country’s population?

It’s not as snap-of-the-fingers as you’re making it sound. And, for reasons stated ad nauseum for about two months, what good does hand-counting do if the standard isn’t rigid and is open to subjectivity and even partisanship?

I would be all for getting a few more volunteers at each polling place to assist voters, and making a greater effort to publicize that if voters are having any trouble at all voting for the candidate for whom they want to vote, assistance is available.

While many may see the resolution of the Bush-Gore presidential race as the main outcome of the SCOTUS ruling, the main message from it that will last is that the “intent of the voter” standard is unconstitutionally subjective and insufficient in anything but a local election, and maybe even then.

[ElvisL1ves]

*Originally posted by Milossarian *
In their utopia, no one is personally responsible for casting their vote correctly.

The next time I see Milo fairly summarize an objection to one of his views will be the first time.

While many may see the resolution of the Bush-Gore presidential race as the main outcome of the SCOTUS ruling, the main message from it that will last is that the “intent of the voter” standard is unconstitutionally subjective and insufficient in anything but a local election, and maybe even then. **

Read it again. Kennedy and/or O’Connor were careful to state that they were declaring new law specific to that case only. The ruling specifically, and embarrassingly, declared it was not to be used as a precedent. This aparently was because the conclusion was opposite to the principles and reasoning it stated.

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by Milossarian *
In their utopia, no one is personally responsible for casting their vote correctly. If they intend to vote for a particular someone, essentially, it doesn’t matter what they do or don’t do. Their “vote” should be counted.

Milo, I’d assume you were on vacation from the boards in November and December, except that I saw you around, and in election threads. Do you have any idea how many times this puerile bit of garbage was responded to by yours truly alone?

How can one fight a pile of deliberate ignorance such as you? After other people have refuted your arguments, you just wait for another thread, and state them again, as if they’d never been responded to.

Yet one more time:

1. People are fallible.

2. If a large group of people are confronted with the opportunity for error, people are going to make errors.

3. If, all else being equal, you give two large groups of people the same task, and have Group A carry out the task by more error-prone means than Group B, Group A will make more errors.

4. If the people in Group A have the opportunity to check their work and those in Group B don’t (or vice versa), then Group A will correct more of their mistakes than Group B (or vice versa).

We know that, by and large, strongly Republican areas of Florida - and the nation - got to vote on less error-prone equipment than voters in strongly Democratic areas. We know that the better voting systems allowed the voters to see what their ballots actually said, before handing them in. Some of the better systems would spit the ballot back at you if you overvoted or undervoted.

In short, the burden of ‘personal responsibility’ fell more heavily on Democratic voters than on Republican voters.

The proper term for such a situation is a ‘handicap’. If, in a horse race, all horses carry 126 pounds, they all have the same handicap. If one horse carries more weight than the other, both horses still have a chance to win, but it shifts the odds in favor of the horse with the lesser burden.

This was Florida on November 7, 2000. Any questions?

Can I get a :rolleyes: ?

You can have my lasting disgust, you steaming, fetid pile of ignorance. Go, and never darken my towels again. :rolleyes:

[wring]

*Originally posted by Milossarian *
I would be all for getting a few more volunteers at each polling place to assist voters, and making a greater effort to publicize that if voters are having any trouble at all voting for the candidate for whom they want to vote, assistance is available.

and in your utopia:

A. the volunteers would actually know the correct answer and answer it

B. the voters would know they’d done something wrong in the first place

The second is the bigger problem. I’d wager the belief that until the news reports started coming out about how many ballots cast had been tossed aside, most -if not all of us- believed that our votes had counted. I think that any method that would allow a voter to walk away believing they’d voted correctly, only to have their vote end up not counted, should be scrapped.

The ‘clear intent of the voter’ actually works quite well and easily in many cases - for example, the folks who both voted for a candidate and wrote the same candidate’s name in for “write in”, and those who voted both straight party** and the invidual representing that party.

Where you seemed to have difficulty is where the machinery of the ballot may have played a factor - the punch cards which do not always punch out totally, to pull an example out of thin air.