What's the real deal on "Undervotes"?

[napi21]

I understanad WHAT an undervote is. IE: casting our total vote, and failing to vote for any candidate for President, or any other separate office on the ballot.

There were many ballots "disqualified" in Fla. in 2000 because of UNDERVOTES. Does that mean if a voter wishes to vote for senator, representative, councilman, etc, but dislikes all available candidates for President, so they decide to leave that office blank, their entire ballot is disregarded?

They were discussing this on cspan this morning, and talked a lot about over votes and under votes, but never explained what the result of an undervoted ballot really is.

[Lord_StarFyre]

1. I can answer that one

In the case of Florida 2000, an "Overvote" was when for whatever reason, both Gore & Bush were selected. So, Cruella Harris determined that in those cases, clearly, the intent of the voter was Bush.

An "Undervote" in Cruella and Jeb's view was one where the voter only selected Gore, in which case that vote needed to be disqualified...

Does that make sense?

[trotsky]

2. Another type of overvote:

Voted for Gore, then wrote in "Gore".

Clearly in that case the intent of the voter is unclear, and so those votes were not counted. :mad:

[libertad]

3. The vote for Gore and write in Gore was very common here in FL

last time. Also if you voted with the punch card and part of another "chad" besides the one you punched out was dimpled or torn a little they didn't count it as a vote.

[napi21]

5. I understand what an over vote is. Do they still count the rest of

the ballot if someone doesn't vote at all for President? That's why I concentrated on the Under Vote. I think it's very possible some voters could want to vote for all the other fooices, and not like ANY of the candidates for Pres, and want to leave that section blank. Can they do that and still cast their vote for say, Senator?

[Rainbowreflect]

4. LOL, I think you nailed that one.

I think the actual definition is more than one candidate punched is an over vote & no discernible punch is an under vote.

[RedEagle]

6. Under votes also caused by

Not punching the hole through- Never cleaning chad trays, as they had not in Florida, helps fascilitate this.

Cards misaligned- Punch could occur in wrong spot.

A gregarious chad that won't part with the card- If not paying close attention,could go unnoticed by the voter. This can be aided by insufficient pre-stamping of the hole or putting a hard to discern backing on the ballot, perhaps just in that spot.


Please note that with optical scan:

With some units the wrong marking utensil will not read. It must have a carbon base.

The mark might be smudged out of the read area.

Misalignment of the ballot can cause false readings.

A faulty scan head can miss readings.

There is such a thing as invisible ink, with carbon too, but that would most likely cause an overvote.


The most serious problem, however, resides with the software.

While the Florida chads can be a problem, keep in mind the 16022 Velousia votes were from optical scan and were being entered into a central tabulator.

Can you mess with paper? Certainly. Can you affect an election on a massive scale with paper? Hard to do. Can you recount paper? Yes.

Will you ever develop a voting system that is 100% mistake and fraud-free, especially from insider fraud? Extremely unlikely. Otherwise, we'd have dispensed with paper in any kind of transaction by now.

What the vapor advocates don't get, is that no matter where technology goes, so goes the ability to get around it. It's like they don't even entertain the idea that hacking ability develops right along, too.

Technology is the answer and technology is the danger. The more complex a system is, the more ways to mess with it.

What we see with most voting systems is PR hype to buy the neatest new toy on the block, with no warrantee it won't cause irreparable harm to democracy. And we won't get our money- or our elections back.

[elehhhhna]

7. New Vanity Fair Issue has a GREAT article explaining this--

The Florida voting debacle as told by the Supreme Court Clerks (anonymously)--an unprecidented set of interviews, to be sure, and a chilling confirmation of what we suspected was going on in Fla. & the USSC in 2000 ...


Why the Librool Meedeeuh hasn't toutied this article is a mystery. (nyuk nyuk nyuk!)

[TahitiNut]

8. The "real deal" is that an automated system failure ...

... is being fraudulently characterized as dispositive rather than diagnostic.

Let's try to be clear. Ballot tabulation systems, when properly designed, will tally a vote for a specific candidate when the 'certainty' is very high. In other words, careful and responsible design will try to get a 5-nines (i.e. 99.999%) or greater degree of assurance that when a ballot is tallied for a specific candidate that a intense and unbiased manual forensic examination of that ballot will agree with the system's tally. In order to achieve such a low error rate for a tallied ballot, the system will "reject" (fail to tally) ballots where anomalies and variances are detected by that system.

The probability that what a system calls an "undervote" (just a system diagnostic message) is, in fact, an undervote (no vote in a particular race) is far, far lower. The system is not designed, nor should it be, to be error-free in such a diagnostic, since it's presumed (in system design) that a manual examination of the ballot will be dispositive.

When any such automated system "rejects" (fails to tally) a ballot, it does so with a 'diagnostic message' (more relevant to the system than the ballot) that goes a bit further than just 'rejected.'

This is where the rhetorical characterization of the automated system's behavior departs from the reality.

Depending on the ballot medium (punch card, mark sense, etc.), an "undervote" will, under manual examination, have a 2% to 10% likelihood of being a valid vote. The tighter the system tolerances in tallying a vote for a specific candidate, the higher the probability that a rejected ballot will, in fact, be a valid vote when carefully and objectively examined.

Example: Suppose a voter using an optical scan ballot circles the name of the candidate rather than fills in the box adjacent to that candidate's name. The system will reject (fail to tally) that ballot and will characterize the rejection as an "undervote". It's NOT actually an undervote. The voter's choice is clear and unambiguous! It's a vote.

Confusion arises, however, since the rejected ballots are only examined and tallied manually (under most state election procedures) when the count of such votes will potentially/possibly change the material outcome of the election. When the outcome would not be changed by a manual count of 'rejected' ballots, no such manual count takes place and the results of the election will be (over-)reported with the 'undervote' as indicated by the tabulation system.