Fred Galvin wrote:
> There is nothing *wrong* with "undervote" ballots. Voters are not
> required to vote on every office and every question on the ballot.
> Probably, *most* people who vote don't fill out their ballots
> completely. Voters who choose not to vote for any of the candidates
> for president have just as much right to have their vote counted as
> anybody else, and it is *wrong* to take their votes and donate them to
> one or another of the candidates. No doubt, many voters make mistakes,
> but there is no particular reason to think the *undervotes* are
> mistakes: you could just as well say that lots of people who punched
> the Gore hole really meant to vote for one of the other candidates.
US voters are indeed totally free not to vote for a presidential candidate.
Although I suspect that the percentage of the US voting population who
actually choose this option is quite low.
However there is a known failure mode of automatic vote counting systems.
If the voting machines sometimes imperfectly punch holes, the still-attached
chad can obscure the hole on a subsequent machine counting. In which case
the machine count may not accurately represent to intent of the voter.
AFAIK there is general agreement that unbiased humans are better at
identifying the difference between unpunched holes and imperfectly
punched holes than current counting machines -- which after all were
only designed to distinguish between unpunched and perfectly punched
holes.
Peter
If you are saying that recounts should recount all votes, and be repeated
until the result is clear, I'd have to agree. In the UK we manage to do
this within hours -- a day at most -- and tend to think that it's
self-evidently the appropriate thing to do. (A recount happens if any
of the candidates ask for it. I don't know what the rules are to avoid
infinite loops. In practice the count seems to converge quite rapidly
and to the technical satisfaction of all candidates.)
But UK and US elections are so different that this is definitely not
intended as a criticism of US practice. In the UK the count is only for a
single constituency and there is only one vote recorded on each ballot
paper. But again -- if the result is really close --it eventually boils
down to humans examining in detail the relatively small number of
papers where the voting intention is a matter of judgement.
Perhaps the most telling difference is that our manually based system
ensures that there are adequate numbers of trusted bodies about to
fully identify and examine questionable votes on a short timescale. So
it's a fortunate side-effect rather than an intended feature.
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