BK’s Well-Considered Rants

I frequently serve as an election judge in Roseville. Sometimes voters ask if they have to vote in every race. Of course not. Of course not. Frightening. More frightening to think how many people who don’t ask the question and go about voting on every office, apparently choosing the name that sounds the best.

This is how insane people like Sharon Anderson and Jack Shepard get votes. Lots. It’s only a matter of time before another embarrassment, like Sharon winning the Republican nomination for attorney general in 1994, happens with Jack Shepard, a fugitive living in Italy.

I drafted a bill that got authored in the Minnesota Legislature last year, HF 4140/SF1582, which would require each race on the ballot to have an oval for “No Choice.” I got the idea from a book by Andrew Gumbel, Steal This Vote, who proposed it as a security measure, namely to prevent evil people with access to the ballot from smudging an oval in a race left blank by the voter. There were 24,806 voters who voted for president but not senator in Minnesota this year. That’s a lot of opportunities for malfeasance with a margin in only double digits.

But if you observe the Senate recount going on, you can see that there is almost no way for such a thing to happen. On election day, the voter puts the ballot in the scanner. At the end of the day, at least two people from different parties take those ballots out of the scanner and into sealed bags. They are opened at the recount center by election judges with many, many people watching. After  counting they are sealed again. You would have to be David Copperfield to get a smudge on unnoticed.

Still I see a benefit to the “No Choice” oval beyond security. It validates those who want to make a mark in every race, even if they have no idea who or what they are voting for. If the lower ballot races are decided by those who really know something, we should have fewer mistakes.

Also, there have been cases of suspected unintentional undervoting, because of bad ballot design or malfunction. One bad case was in Sarasota, Florida, a few years back where the number of ballots with no vote for Congress led many to believe that the electronic machines either lost votes or confused voters. What’s baffling about that case is that the advantage of voting by computers is that they can be programmed to warn the voter of any skipped races.

We could do the same with optical scan, but so many people skip races that it would annoy them and the election judges to have their ballots pop out. Would it be less annoying to fill out multiple “No Choice” ovals for all those judges and soil supervisors?