Posted on 10/25/2004 5:22:37 PM PDT by Jacob Kell
In a situation reminiscent of the infamous butterfly-ballot troubles in Florida during the 2000 election, a similar ballot in the battleground state of Ohio is set to equally confuse voters of that state, with President Bush's supporters claiming it puts their candidate at a distinct disadvantage.
The box for voters to punch on the Cuyahoga County ballot to choose Democrat John Kerry for president is directly across from his name. The box to punch for Bush, however, is nowhere near his name on the ballot.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
Hopefully the Republican voters are smarter that the DU's in Florida and with advance warning will figure it out!
The democrats really had no complaint in Florida, the ballot was designed and approved by the democrat head of the election board. Is the head of the election board in Cuyahoga County a Republican or democrat?
oops
And, if a manual recount is needed (this is Florida after all), there definitely are no hanging chads. If there is a mark on a bubble, it counts. If there is not a mark, it doesn't count. If there is a mark on each candidates bubble, the ballot is spoiled. That's it. End of story..
i believe the chairman of the Cuyahoga County board of elections in charge of the absentee ballots resigned without reason on friday, before all this came out. (a dem, i believe.) interesting. no word yet on what the GOP is going to do.
Can someone get this to Drudge now?
There should be someone to instruct each voter to the error before they vote
What is so frickin' tough about making a simple ballot? Typos? Gimme a break! Perhaps we can solve this all by giving every voter a crayon and ask them to circle their choice.
We used to have that system, and I loved it, but we have been upgraded to touch screen. Much easier to make multilingual ballots don't cha know.</sarcasm>
So what? Does anyone ever proofread ballots in Ohio? Also why is the Republican candidate at the bottom of the list? Oh! The parties are listed in alphabetical order. That is a stupid rule. Why should the Aardvark party that gets 10 votes statewide be listed before the Republican Party that has a governor and both US senators in the state of Ohio. In Texas the parties are listed in the order that the parties received in the most recent gubernatorial race. Since Texas has a Republican governor, Republican candidates are the first candidates listed in every race on every ballot in the state. The Democrat candidates come next, because their candidate for governor in 2002 came in second. Next come the Libertarians, Greens, etc.
Follow my link to a sample ballot from the first precinct in my county. It is an optically scannable ballot that is extremely easy to understand and to mark.
Touch screens are stupid. They don't save any money. I was talking to a Nueces County, Texas Republican Party official who says the county will switch to touch screen. He does not favor it for many reasons. First they are more expensive. Second they don't create a human readable paper trail. Third, the computers will become obsolte quickly and will need to be replaced.
Also, how do I know the wording on multilingual ballots on a touch screen machine actually mean the same thing as the English version? There is nothing in the US Contitution guaranteeing the rigth to ballots in any particular language. As far as I am concerned, Congress should pass legislation overturning federal court decsions mandating ballots in foreign languages.
I'm only pointing out a fact. Don't be so jumpy.
I think it should be corrected. Even though it may be an innocent (and stupid) mistake, it is very misleading.
I think Ohio ought to ban punch card ballots. The ballots themselves don't even have any markings denoting which election they are for, because they any that are left over can be used in other elections. Besides being less accurate than optically scanned ballots, the fact that blank ballots are the same from election to election means that someone could insert a whole bunch of fradulent ballots into a stack of real ballots, and no one would be able to detect them.
The optically scanned ballots used in my county and many counties aroud the country are only useful for the election for which they were printed. The names of the candidates are plainly listed on the ballot next to two halves of an arrow pointing to each candidate or issue. Marking a ballot is easy; just draw a line connecting the two halves of the arrow. As an anti-fraud measure, all the ballots have a unique serial number. There is a limited number of ballots printed for each election, and no two ballots can have the same serial number.
bump
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