What are you going to do about explaining this to the voter?

Patty Lycan

Nice effort. I hope it will prove beneficial to our need to eliminate the partial undervote flag. My equipment is not prepared. Nor has there been any effort to push for retesting that I am aware of.

It is important to note that your jurisdiction’s equipment could technically accommodate the flag for part of the ballot; and, yet, you know and have conveyed the message that the secrecy of the ballot will be compromised, voters will be intimidated and “fair and equal” elections/ballots among all candidates seems to be usurped.

There is a solution to this issue: one that gives voters maximum privacy and one that allows votes to be cast on auditable paper ballots. The solution: Ballot Marking Devices. The idea is simple: a voter prepares the ballot on a computerized system; one that also allows voters with disabilities to vote and one that also allows multiple languages.

Preparation of the ballot does not mean casting the ballot. Preparation means preparing an unambiguous paper ballot that is cast separately from the preparation of the ballot. During the preparation of the ballot, the voter can be warned in private if there is an undervote.

I’m sure there are other solutions as well (a scanner in a voting booth dedicated to detecting voter errors).

The use of the term “unambiguous” is chosen carefully. Many handmarked ballots are ambiguous for a variety of reasons — such as the voter’s circling a name or putting an X in a box that should be blackened. Note that in this case, the warning of an undervote ALSO serves as a warning that the ballot is improperly marked.

Actually, many voters object. They’ve told me as much. And you can count me among those people.

It’s disappointing that you would assign a motive to the clerks when I linked directly to our list of concerns. This will present clerks with no more work. I estimate that it will increase the amount of time to do testing by a total of 5 to 10 minutes. Our programming time will increase by about 1 minute. As to the vendors, they will be more than happy to charge various clerks for the added expense of programming the election. Premier (formerly Diebold) told the State Board of Elections as much.

As to design flaws in ballots, I would point you to my blog post from August of last year where I write about our implementation of many of the recommendations by the Brennan Center for improved ballot design.

http://blog.champaigncountyclerk.com/2008/08/20/making-better-ballots/

As to auditing, I’d point you to the various posts I’ve written regarding post election redundant recounts.

The opposition of county clerks to the proposal has me wondering why.

Is the opposition due to:

the clerks’ close relationship to the voting machine vendors whose sofware was not designed to warn voters of undervotes?

the clerks’ attempt to avoid extra work?

the clerks’ fear of longer lines at the polls?

Certainly the Champaigne county clerk can not really think it violates the US constitution to alert voters to the fact that they may’ve forgotten to vote in a contest? We’ve seen too many cases where ballot design caused voters not to notice an important contest.

We’ve also seen an eerie similarity in the design specification flaws among all voting systems in the US such as writable log files, voting systems that do not report counts for ballots that are normally stored together, making auditing the accuracy of today’s voting machines very difficult and time-consuming. Just who is designing the specifications for all of today’s voting machines so poorly?

Election officials need to begin consulting with experts to require voting systems that use modern auditability and security features, not trying to cover their mistakes by avoiding common-sense measures used in virtually all other fields.