I don’t think you can decline to take the whole thing. And tearing up or taking home a ballot doesn’t make sense for anybody, much less 349 people. If people are allowed to do that, there is no way to document whether somebody was ever even GIVEN this or that page of the ballot. That by itself would invite voter fraud - and make a totally unaccountable system where voter fraud would easily be concealed. If this is allowable, the system is a crock from the outset and needs to be investigated for that reason if nothing else.
There were 397 people who undervoted. Of those, 349 hid the 2nd page of the ballot from election workers - going to the extra step of holding that page separate from the other, putting it in their purse, tearing it up, etc? That makes no sense to me.
What was on the first page and what was on the 2nd page?
Out of 175,554 people chosen at random, I gay-ron-damn-tee that at least 349 (0.2%) can be counted upon to do something that doesn't make sense.
I looked at their ballot and compared it to mine (granted I’m in another state and county, BUT, we are a very LARGE county, about 3 times the number of voters (at least) than St. Lucie. We have very good SOS and County Recorder. We had 15 props, judges, State, Fed, City, County elections on our ballot. The descriptions of our props saved space, and that problem of multiple ballots. One ballot, two sided, the machine reads both sides at one time, without re-feeding.
Very user friendly our County is.
In my polling place, we had a three-card ballot. The first card contained federal and state races, the second card contained state initiatives, and the third card contained local races. All three cards were double-sided and fed into an optical scanner.