The Minnesota Senate recount is going much smoother than the 2000 Florida recount or the 2004 Washington Governor recount, but there’s still room for improvement. For one thing, it’s taking forever. For another, the counting standard is still subjective enough to cause problems.
I’m not a big fan of “intent of the voter” as a counting standard. It’s an admirable goal, but it’s hard to apply consistantly to poorly filled-out ballots because discerning the intent of the voter requires a certain amount of guesswork. And when an election is being decided by a tiny fraction of a percent of votes cast, I don’t want even the most careful and impartial guesswork skewing the results.
I propose the following reforms:
- Set a clear, objective counting standard, such as “Fill in the oval next to the candidate of your choice. Do not fill in more than one oval per race. If you wish to vote for a candidate not on the ballot, write their name in the “write-in” box and fill in only the oval next to that box. Do not make any other marks on your ballot, as this will invalidate the ballot.” Print this standard in the voter information packet and on the ballot itself.
- Let voters feed their ballots into the optical scan machines themselves in the voting booth. Have a display show the voter how their vote will be counted and hit “accept” (vote is cast) or “reject” (ballot is shredded. The voter turns in the confetti at the front desk for a fresh ballot so they can try again).
- Have optional computerized kiosks which will print a ballot for you based on your selections. You still get a paper ballot which you carry over and put in the optical scan machine yourself.
- A random sample of precincts and a few precincts selected by each candidate are recounted by hand on election night against the objective standard. The purpose of this count is to prevent fraud by the manufacturers and maintainers of the machines. If the sampled hand-count matches the machine-count, the objective machine count is final.
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That all looks like exactly how they do it in Michigan, except the shredder part.
We should acknowledge, however, that no matter what it "feels" like, paper ballots are less reliable than electronic.
But otherwise, I’m surprised every state doesn’t do it this way.
Eric,
I worked tech support Election Day for a company that makes electronic ballot machines and they pretty much already do everything you listed to one degree or another.
I won’t go into details but never underestimate the ability of a user (voter/ballot counter) to still frak it up. No system is going to operate perfectly as long as people are still involved.
I’m glad to hear that at least some places are doing things right.
California prints the instructions from point 1 on the ballot, but "intent of the voter" is the legal standard. For point 2, I think the scan machine spits out overvotes, but there’s no verification for undervotes or misvotes. Some precincts use voting machines, but they’re the full Diebold-style black box monstrosities rather than a way of preparing a paper ballot. I don’t know about point 4.
The key part of my plan for minimizing opportunities for humans to screw things up is to make the counting standard objective and to make the machine count final unless audits turn up evidence that the machines are miscounting the ballots. There’s still room to screw things up — voters can fill in the wrong oval and not check the readout on the machine, absentees can’t check the readout at all, the audit hand-count can get the count wrong, and my plan does nothing about old-fashioned registration fraud — but less than in the current system in most states.
We won’t have honest elections until we get rid of the recount till the democrat wins rule. "Found" ballots are a invite to fraud, and we seem have enough found ballots here to have changed the results.
I don’t understand what you are even talking about. In every recount I can think of except Florida there has been one clear and consistent standard.
Recount until the Democrat wins.
It works. It’s consistent. It makes the children happy.
May as well stick with it.
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