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Minnesota Senate Recount: Challenged ballots: You be the judge
[Quote:]
It’s your turn to play election judge. Tell us how you would rule in the case of these challenged ballots.
Here’s only one of many on the site:
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Well, three ways to look at this one I think:
1. It is pretty clear where the intention was since the machine’s optical registration box was circled next to just one candidate.
2. This is a failure of the user interface. I read a similar discussion about web forms that are too strict about how user entered data is formatted. This form’s interface, requiring the voter to fill in a small oval to cast their vote us clearly too strict.
3. This is being used as a mechanism to disqualify voters who are either too stupid to follow instructions, or too lazy to read them.
I’d say count the vote, and fix the user interface to be simpler and more tolerant of human impreciseness!
Whatever else is true, Minnesota law would count this as a vote for Franken, even if they did it wrong.
One very important thing we shouldn’t overlook is that the Republican Party tried all sorts of dirty tricks to convince potential Democratic voters either not to vote or to vote incorrectly, so it may not be purely voter stupidity. In Philadelphia, they were passing out brochures that said that, due to anticipated high turnout, Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats should vote on Wednesday. *shrug*
John, as for 1), have you seen the other samples? Not all of them are this clear. As for 2) and 3), yes, indeed.