(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Stealing from Mike Hoye:

This is what a Michigan ballot looks like.

This is what a Florida ballot looked like last election.

Mike says: "Insanity. Deliberate and verging on malicious."

I says: Check out the Presidential election printing. This looks like a machine-read ballot. Notice how there's no way to mark Bush directly - but, just looking at that, if you want to mark Kerry, you punch the button beside Kerry without examining the rest in detail - which votes for Bush. If you want to vote Bush, you notice that it's displaced by one, and you vote for Bush.

Oh, of COURSE this is just an accidental misprinting, in a swing state coming from *that* bunch of Republicans.

Also stealing from Mike, this is an Elections Canada standard ballot.

Comments

[spartonian.livejournal.com]

Its odd that my Michigan ballot looks nothing like the one you linked to.

Are absentee ballots generally different in appearance?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I would assume they would be marked differently - as "absentee", among other things - but presumably they would have the same content if they're all from the same organisation, and they're all voting for the same people in the same races.

If, however, absentee ballots are standardised amongst all states and counted differently, they might look completely different. Did you have all those votes, with all the same names?

I supposed you've already filled in yours and mailed it off, so you can't exactly scan a copy.

[spartonian.livejournal.com]

They have all the candidates listed top to bottom with the offices they're running for. It starts at the presidential election, goes to state, then on to local/county elections. On the top of the ballot from left to right are the parties each candidate represents.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

They may go through different printers, which is a big reason as to why they may look different.

Voting in this country is insane: it's handled on a county-by-county basis, and sometimes on a precinct-by-precisct basis.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

And since Adam is in Spain, that's probably a different county.

What's worrying me, really, are the voter registration practices of the USA. You can register anywhere, and they *ask* you, on the *honour system*, while stating that they *cannot* check for certain, to give them anywhere you've been registered before so they can take you off the list there.

In short, you can register in every place that uses a different voter's list, and you'll never be caught unless people manually compare the lists - and nobody running the election does so.

Come ON, people. Computerisation! Communication! ONE SINGLE NAITONAL VOTER REGISTRY. You've got bloody unique Social Security ID numbers, USE 'EM FOR SOMETHING.

Sheesh.

As much as I mock Americans for living in a technological backwater and being 20 years behind the times in daily life, it always shocks me to see how true it is.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, this was apparently only misprinted on 69 ballots, and new ballots were reprinted and immediately sent out.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

A little more digging shows that this is the absentee ballot sent out to Ann Arbor, Washtenaw, and Alma, at least. Additionally, somebody claiming to be a polling clerk has stated that the scanners used are optical, and scan for marks on a specific part of the ballot - meaning as along as the scanner is programmed correctly, if it's counting *holes* it will count votes correctly along the candidate line, and you'll be unable to vote for Bush unless you punch out the bit that's not perforated.

If it's counting *a lack of black ink*, it will mark all votes as being for Bush in addition to any actual other votes, and if it's programmed *to use this ballot*, it will count all votes for Kerry for Bush, and all Green party votes for Kerry, and all votes for Bush either for Bush (because they noticed the misprint) or not at all (if they punch out the bit beside Bush's name)

Now I'd *really* like to see what the Armed Forces Absentee ballots look like.