If i understand you correctly, you don’t care that the ballot is so poorly designed that it might cause Kerry supporters to accidentally cast a vote for Bush, but at the same time you are concerned that the ballot’s poor design might cause some Bush votes to be counted for Kerry.
Interesting.
The ballot is NOT poorly designed. I got my New Mexico absentee ballot today and it is the exact same thing (well, the little pictures for straight-ticket voting are different, everything is repeated in Spanish, and the people on the ballot are for New Mexico positions, but everything else is the same) as the Michigan ballot. These things are, as I understand it, scanned in much the same manner as a scantron or any other computer-scored test you might have taken. Brutus is pointing out that the misprint that shifts all the arrows down might make for reading errors by the computer or mistakes by a person in a hurry doing a hand count. If anything, it is more likely that the misprint would make it impossible to vote for Bush unless everything was hand counted instead of run through the scanner. And even then, any one of the candidates could be jacked.
You do not. Asterion, on the other hand, does.
Well, I suppose you could compensate by figuring out the right placement and approximate size of the rectangle needed for the scanner to pick up and then place the mark there even without the arrow. But it was a better idea for them to reprint it, which, after all, they did.
I cannot BELIEVE that ballot! OMG!! The Natural Law Party is still around??
Those are the sort of ballots I used in Somerville. The machines read the pencil marks you use to complete the arrows in a certain place, so I think there was no way to vote for Bush except for straight Repub ticket.
Yeah, i realized a while after i posted that the misprint would not necessarily favour either party.
Still, i find it hard to understand how such a misprint could occur in the first place, unless the whole printing job was set up incorrectly. I guess i just find it hard to believe that something so important wouldn’t be checked and rechecked before the fucking things are mailed out.