Having been involved in recounts the standard, at least in Massachusetts, is set pretty low to establish the “intent of the voter”. Maybe they just have different laws in Minnesota because according to startribune.com the following ballot is being challenged for voter intent.
The bubble beside Norm Coleman’s name appeared to have both an X and a squiggle in it, but the Al Franken campaign wants the state Canvassing Board to rule on whether it should count. That’s the only challenge in the special envelope in Plymouth so far, according to Sandy Engdahl, the city clerk and the official running the city recount.
Really, must the formerly funny one win at all costs. By any means necessary right?
Please share widely!
What’s the big deal. It’s a stupid challenge by the Franken campaign. There probably also are stupid challenges by the Coleman campaign — like, for example, stating there should be no recount at all, which I believe Coleman himself did just after the election!
Why did you only include the tiny portion around the bubbles?
See my comment below… both sides are making frivolous challenges, but the recount as a whole seems to be a very smooth process.
… it could be a check that indicated preference followed by a ‘squiggle’ over the check to indicate retraction. If so, properly they should have requested a new ballot. However, also properly, if their is a reasonable chance that what I just described is a truthful description for why the ballot looks the way it does, then there is a reasonable chance that the intent of the voter is suspect.
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p>I had to laugh when I was thinking about this because this is exactly the kind of thing my boss often does when marking up something he wants me to edit.
Echoing Bob’s, Laurel’s, and Mr Lynne’s remarks: what if all the other votes on this ballot were checkmarks and this was the only one in which there was a squiggle over the checkmark.
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p>As horrible as the thought is, this one might require an objective analysis by the board.
This is a link to some examples of challenged ballots. http://minnesota.publicradio.o…
I particularly like the “thumbprint” question.
Thanks for bringing some needed clarity to the discussion. Much more interesting than EaBo’s single example, obviously selected to favor the position of his preferred candidate rather than to advance a thoughtful discussion of an interesting topic.
Shows that both campaigns have made some ridiculous challenges.
Or maybe part of the “teaching to the test” strategy is drills on how to fill the ovals correctly…
they do spend a lot of time on filling in ovals. Thank you NCLB! Is our children learning yet?
Bubbles to fill in are hardly new with either MCAS or NCLB. We were told as far back as first grade not to make stray marks, erase completely, etc. As far as I know on these tests the computer makes the call and there is no going back to determine the “intent of the student”. I remember the first time I voted was also the first election in which my town switched to this method having previously voted by poking a stylus through styrofoam. The poll worker very carefully explained that you need to take the marker and fill in the bubble completely. I was amused because I felt like saying, “Look, I’m a high school senior; I’ve taken the SATs, PSATs, SAT IIs, and several AP exams; I think I get how to fill in a bubble!”
A lot of folks are from other countries originally and may not speak English very well, if at all. They may not of completed High School, much less taken AP tests and the like. These folks have just as much a right to vote as you do and it’s the job of poll workers to make sure that everyone understands how to vote correctly. I apologize if you feel that your intelligence is insulted because a poll worker is carefully explaining voting procedures to you, but try to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
I said I was amused, not insulted. By all means a new method should be explained, but I thought you made it sound like this takes lots of practice. A sample vote with correct and incorrect examples at the top of the ballot (translated as necessary) should suffice.
Sorry for the confusion, tone is sometimes hard to determine from writing.
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p>I have been a poll work for 4 elections now in a Somerville precinct with a lot of immigrant voters, so it is sometimes my job to explain, several hundred times, how to correctly mark the ballot and still people make mistakes. We use an optical scan ballot that involves drawing a line connecting two ends of an arrow and people will usually understand that they need to make a line, since that’s what I will demonstrate, but will sometimes put it in the wrong place. (eg. next to the candidate’s name, rather than connecting the two ends of the arrow.) We put big signs in the polling place saying connect the ends of the arrow, with an illustration, but they’re only in English. Adding other languages (French, Spanish and Portuguese, at a minimum) would help tremendously.
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p>In California, where I’m from originally, you could vote in any language of your choice, provided that it was at least somewhat common in the state. We had electronic voting, so that made it somewhat easier, but we still had multi-lingual ballots even when we were using the punch cards of “hanging chad” fame. (Though this was also an easier system to multi-lingualize than optical scan, since you don’t actually mark the same document as the names of the candidates, rather you just stick the punchcard into a “book” that contains the names of the candidates and an arrow pointing to a hole showing where to punch.)
As someone whose thinking style is excessively Cartesian, I’m always surprised by people whose thinking tends to be associative or who expect social interactions where I expect rules. These are the people, who will wave pedestrians to walk in front of their car — when they have a green light and 20 cars behind them. Good hearted, yes. Rule-based, not so much.
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p>You can easily imagine such people thinking that their responsibility is to express their choice on the ballot. The details of how things are expressed are just too boring or too potentially complicated to listen to. In fact, a filled in dot may not accurately express what they mean by their vote. Something more individualized may be called for.
I share your pet peeve about waving people by, but what else is there to express? I suppose if we did IRV you could express more through ranking candidates, but in our system you choose a candidate (or choose not to). I’m not sure how saying, “Be sure to fill in the bubble completely.” is either boring or complicated. Turning a ballot question or candidate list into an open-response question would be a nightmare.
Christopher, Christopher, we must simply accept that there are people unlike you and me. Those people attend to different things. They don’t embrace formal rules, even very simple formal rules. Ones I have met have virtues I lack and strong abilities where I have weak ones. Constitutionally, though, they cannot cook from recipes, write computer programs, or play chess. They are not morons. They are just different.
We probably all know some of them, and given the way the brain works they are probably right-minded (therefore left handed, abstract rather than concrete, creative rather than academic), not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just don’t know how you can change voting to accomodate them nor am I enthusiastic frankly about trying to.
I’m left handed and have no absolutely problem filling out a ballot.
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p>I’m also analytical enough to note that the blog entry EaBo excerpted has an order of magnitude more comments than the other entries on the same subject. Googling around shows that particular ballot excerpt has been published on a number of Republican sites (the original appears to be the American Spectator), almost always accompanied by smears like this one:
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p>MY question is what kind of mind accepts this sort of obvious propaganda, no questions asked?
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p>The mind that is already made up. Same as the person who will only watch Fox News or Keith Olbermann in order to avoid evidence that they will have to deny. We all do this to some extent.
MCAS scorers have less training that these election volunteers. But at least private industry’s making good money off it!
I disagree, however, that the intent was to write in a vote for “Bachmann”.
It’s pretty obvious that the voter was commenting that all the candidates on the ballot were “Bad Men”.
It’s an overvote by virtue of a check for Coleman and something written in. If it were just an X for Coleman I’d count it for him even if the directions were to fill the bubble.
Your source isn’t the Star Tribune, it’s a blog entry…
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p>Another entry in the same blog directly contradict your point:
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p>The general tone of the blog is how smoothly the recount is going:
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marked in this sqiggly way? if the rest of the ovals were enatly filled in, i’d say there may be room for a challenge. if this is the style of ballot marking the voter used throughout the ballot, then there is little room for challenge. eabo doesn’t give us enough information to make a more sound judgment. surprise.
The municipality conducting the recount has a responsibility to look at “intent of the voter.” The campaign observers are there as part of an adversarial process. I volunteered at a recount that I won’t name. Let’s just say that the candidate was Mary Humperdink. The ballot was marked “NOT HUMPERDINK.” The campaign observer for the Humperdink campaign challenged it when it was counted as a no vote. The campaign made the argument that many people knew Mary by her nickname, “Naughty” and that some further shortened it to “Not” as a diminutive. The vote was not counted, but the observer was doing what he was supposed to do.
The Franken campaign is asking an objective body to rule on something.
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p>Why that’s a take-no-prisoners approach if I ever heard it! Will these people stop at nothing?
I don’t know why conservatives are grousing on this. The race was very, very, very close. Too close to allow machines, which have margins of error, to count. Counting must be done by hand, very, very, very carefully, in order to get the true results of the election.
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p>Why is anyone opposed to finding out the true, correct results of this race by careful examination of each ballot? This kind of thing is usually not necessary, but when less than 200 votes separate the candidates, this is just the way things must work.