Between 18 and 20% of voters forgot to choose a candidate.

Again it prooves FL is part of the problem.

When you are to stupid to figure out how to vote IMHO you are to stupid to pick a canidate in the first place.

Im in the middle of this district... I live in Manatee county, and out Supervisor of Elections is the best...we use a paper ballot with a scanner machine..it is easy and fast.

Sarasota county is where they had trouble...but there may be no trouble..

This was the nastiest race in the country...and everyone was tired of the BS...Everyone knows some one who didnt vote for anyone in this race..hell, my wife did that...

the voting machines in Sarasota tell you about any under/over votes before youre done, and they give you the chance ot fix it before youre done...

There is no voting problem here.....just a candidate problem.

I have no problem with the "Idea" of electronic voting. It could be a great tool.
However I do have a problem with using the most insecure Operating System, the most hacked, most easily compromised system known.
A well built and secure system could be used, and the problems eliminated.

Hernando used paper with a computer tallying machine.

Who says they "forgot"?

Many voters only vote for candidates they actually support or know. So they leave ballots sprinkled with blanks because they didn't see any reason to vote on those people/issues.

It's only when someone wants to claim the blanks that this ever comes up.... but the common sense answer is the right one: they are blank because the voter didn't want to choose any of the available options.

The margin of victory is around 350 votes... And the Demorat candidate is starting to act like Algore a little...looking for any fraud accusation she can...she lost..suck it up and go home...

Our "electronic" ballot had two pages. Maybe those folks didn't catch it?

Our Diebold machines printout a paper recording of the votes. Any recount would count those as well. So it would be hard to fudge the results.

While the voter does not get a copy of the paper he can watch it print out. I did and all my choices were recorded correctly.

So I am not worried about any shenanigans with the vote in my county.

Florida: Where every vote counts.

And counts, and counts, and counts ...

pax

Funny y'all should mention this. For the last two days I've been hand-counting ballots in Pima County AZ, where a new state law mandates a recount of 2% of the paper ballots (mostly paper optical scan here) so long as at least two political parties agree to get involved. Three parties did, I was one of five Libertarian counters today, there were 11 GOP and 16 Dems.

I handled the paper for two precincts, one apparantly more Democratic, the other slightly more Republican. We had a hotly contested US Senate race and competitive Congressional races.

Yes, there were people who only voted for governor and propositions but they were nowhere near 13%. 3% would be more like it. AZ had about 20 propositions covering a lot of hot topics.

Here's the actual Sarasota vote data:

http://www.srqelections.com/results/gen2006sum.htm

First, this election had a much bigger ballot than has been implied earlier in this thread. Governor, lots of propositions, a good selection of mid-ticket races.

My first glance says that the Democrats have something to complain about. Bigtime.

OK: start by comparing the undervote rates on this Congressional race with other races. It seems damned unlikely to me that the state AG's race would net so much more interest (less undervote) than a US Congressional race. Ditto the "chief financial officer"...DOUBLE ditto the "commisioner for agriculture" or the various "charter review board" races.

It gets worse. ALL of the statewide "amendments" had less voter disinterest than this congressional race!? Including the least popular, Amendment 1 ("state planning and budget process"...yaaawn!). See also:

http://www.votesmartflorida.org/mx/hm.asp?id=home

Is anybody ready to tell me that these races would attract less attention than the US Congress in THIS year when control of congress is so contested?

Sorry guys. I see some evidence here that the machines were told to throw out votes in this race. Randomly or selectively, I can't tell. But here's the kicker: even if it's random, it still could rig the race.

The candidates are separated by 373 votes across all four counties. In THIS county the Democrat won (supposedly, but let's assume that part is true).

The ratio is 58:65 (GOP/DEM). There are 18,382 undervotes. There were less than 2,000 undervotes in other upticket races so...let's say the real undervotes is 2,382, leaving us with a nice round number of 16,000 "thrown out votes". I'm being conservative here, I think. On that 58:65 split, of 16,000 the GOPer gets...hmmm...it's a hairy math problem, isn't it? How many of the 16,000 should the Democrat have over the Republican? I'm embarassed to say that I'm not quite sure how to diddle my calculator in exactly that fashion . Sigh. Somebody will come along in a sec and fill that in.

My point is, if the difference is more than 373 votes, and my gut says it is, then...the election was probably stolen.

Next step, we need to see if undervotes on a precinct-by-precinct basis happened more often in Democratic areas. That can be judged by how each precinct voted in other races...we'll need the "statement of votes cast" (the precinct detail report) to sort that out. See, even if I'm wrong and a 58:65 split of 16,000ish doesn't net a Dem win, it still could if the undervotes were rigged across geographic lines where the voting base for each party is well understood.

Maybe... there wasn't a 'none of the above' selection?
Just a thought.

Just put in a simple "Chose not to vote" line on each candidate category, and then require them to vote each category before the ballot is accepted.

Personally, I like the paper ballot so I vote absentee. Although I wouldn't mind voting online or fax, just to remove the possibility of lost/late ballots, but I am afraid there would be too much chance for fraud.

I make it a point to not vote for a candidate that is running unopposed.

I make it a point to not vote for a candidate that is running unopposed.

Click to expand...

But, they still don't know if you just missed voting on that category or chose not to vote. To make your choice clear, they need a "chose not to vote" mark.

Maybe... there wasn't a 'none of the above' selection?
Just a thought.

Click to expand...

+1
I didn't vote anyone for State Senator, because my incumbent (whom is an anti supported by the Dems AND Working Families Party (CT allows dual endorsemant) was the only choice. I don't care for him as an elected official, and not voting for him let's him know how I feel.

We here at THR tend to vote more strategically than most. In this race, with party control over congress on the line, I just can't see the "agricultural commissioner" race netting more interest.

Ceetee, I think you've nailed it. By this measurement we're looking at over 1,000 votes flipped if the rate of "false spoilage" was random and uniform across the county. It could be a lot worse if there was any geographic bias involved; Susan Pynchon in FL will be all over that question.

Jeez, why doesn't everyone just us optical scanning machines and be done with it? They're simple, they're accurate, and they have a paper ballot trail in case a recount is needed.

Here in VA, 2.4 million people voted in the Senate race and the vote diff between Allen and Webb was only 7,000. Allen didn't even bother to ask for a recount because the optical scanning system is so accurate he knew that a recount wasn't going to make any difference.

:banghead:

Optical scan won't help Florida.

Computers still tally it up. And FL has just banned any attempt to hand-count a ballot that has been scanned by a machine. I wish I was kidding. Such a law made a little bit of sense when it was punchcards, as those have a habit of changing as they get counted. But today? It's an open license to commit fraud.

Thread Drift: I have friends who count the paper ballots in my precinct. They regularly are amazed at how people will goof--and, sometimes, how many.

Vote for both candidates in a race! Or, vote straight ticket at the top of the ballot, and then vote for individuals of the other party, down the list.

Art

That could be a case of someone overlaying a template and shading in the "correct" votes, like how teachers used to use one to grade multiple choice tests before Scantron machines were common.

Kharn

I live exactly where CDignition lives.
Sarasota has screwed the pooch this time and there's no way to correct it.
What part of "Paper Trail" didn't they understand?
So now they're going to recount the totals on a computer. Does anybody expect a change?
So it's 11/ 13 and I still don't know who my Congress critter is? Wonderful
But.... CDignition might be right. The race was just plain out of control. Maybe 13,000 just said the hell with them both and didn't vote for a Congressional candidate at all.

AFS

If I don't intend to vote for either candidate in a race, I'll deliberately overvote (vote for both).

Because if you leave them blank, somebody back at county elections HQ may be tempted to "correct your mistake" in their own partisan direction. And yes, this happens...Napa County California a few years back, it was confirmed with forensic ink analysis.

Voting on party lines upticket but not down isn't that noteworthy.

The weirdest one we got is where...OK, for each candidate name there was a party mark like so:

(DEM)

(REP)

Some people used THOSE as bubbles. Yet there were clearly bubbles for the purpose of being marked...and in those races that were non-partisan and no party marks like that existed, the same voter DID use the proper bubbles.

We found three like this in the nine precincts hand-counting. Each of three three-person panels ran into one of these. In one panel, all three counters called it based on "voter intent", in another all three people called it "undervotes" and in my panel, I was one of two people who called it "voter intent" and said they should count. Since one of us disagreed, it was up to the head elections official (Brad Nelson) to call it, and he called it the same way I did: voter intent was pretty easy to sort out.

AZ law says that if voters mis-mark ballots in a "consistent" fashion and voter intent can be sorted out, the vote counts.

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The worst is when some wit in the mail-in vote group decides to vote with..."unconventional fluids". Like blood, or ketchup, or mascara...