I have been in polling places before where people have crumpled up their ballot and just walked out the door — and those were one page ballots.
In Florida where people were waiting 7 hours in line, and the 2nd card was filled with wordy propositions meaningless to most people, out of 124,031 people don’t you think that there were atleast 349 that did something with that 2nd card other than cast it???
When I’ve voted I was told that if I made a mistake, for instance, I would need to turn in my ballot that I had marked wrongly so they could void that number - thus explaining why the results would be less one ballot. They’d give me a new ballot, they said. The point being that they had to account for what happened to all the ballots they handed out. If somebody crumpled up their whole ballot I would imagine that an election worker would have to void that ballot number, because that ballot was not used to submit a vote.
But to fill out one page and then go to the trouble of treating the other page differently in order to not submit it, rather than simply putting both sheets together into the sleeve seems like more trouble than a frustrated voter would want to go to. If you’re in a hurry, vote for what you care about, skim over the rest to see that you don’t care, and then stick it all in the sleeve and head out.
But the tabulation of undervotes tells me that they kept had to have a way to know which page 1 goes with which page 2 - which suggests some kind of serial/ballot number that matched page 1 to page 2. And if that was the case, it makes no sense for the software designers (literate people being paid to do a specific, detail-oriented job) to use the number of pages cast to calculate the “% Turnout” on their summary report.
Have either of you ever done something with one or another of the ballot pages rather than putting it in the sleeve and letting the computer sort out what you did or didn’t vote on?
I hardly ever vote on school board because I don’t know anything about that race. I’m not going to display my ignorance by throwing away the ballot though. I just put it in the sleeve and neither the computer nor my friends at the polling place will have any idea that it was me who didn’t vote for that race.
Having both pages on record would be important to prove that the person was given the complete ballot and chose not to vote on those issues.