With regard to the number of ballots rejected from the Florida (and
other) precincts -- most of these were because either two holes or no
holes were punched for the candidate. Selecting two holes might reflect
confusion about which hole goes with which candidate (e.g., Gore vs
Buchanan); selecting no holes might reflect the decision not to vote or
an attempt to vote that wasn't successful (e.g., the chad didn't punch
through, the filled-in circle wasn't scanned, etc.).
Many of the currently rejected ballots would go away if a "no vote"
option was available. That way, a voter who doesn't want to vote for
president (or some other office on the ballot) could indicate this
explicitly by selecting the "no vote" option (i.e., the voter can select
Bush, Gore, or No Vote). To catch the two most common errors, each
ballot would be scanned electronically before the voter leaves. A
validity check would detect any double-punch or no-punch errors, and the
voter given a chance to correct the problem either by filling out a new
ballot or by modifying the present one. Once a "valid" ballot is
obtained, it can be scanned for the actual votes cast. All of this needs
to be done so as to preserve anonymity, or course, but that should be
possible.
With an explicit No Vote option and validity checking for double-punch
and no-punch errors, an error that could still occur would be one where
the punch reader (or optical scanner) fails to sense a selected response
in one location (say for Gore) and at the same time erroneously reads
one in a different location (say for Bush). Such an error would not be
caught by the double-punch or no-punch error checking, and the voter's
vote would be tallied for the wrong candidate. But how likely is this
kind of error? And in any event, this kind of error is not one which
produces a rejected ballot, so it does not contribute to the large
number of rejected ballots identified in Florida. (Such an error would
only be caught on a manual recount, or perhaps on a second electronic
scan with a different scanner.)
It seems a shame that so many ballots are rejected. An inexpensive and
workable system like the one suggested above could hopefully reduce
these numbers substantially.
Drake Bradley
Bates College
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