election capers

Yesterday I got to view our elections superviser's office from behind the scenes as they process the ballots in our city's primary election.

I don't think the voters in "Flori-duh" are stupider than a general cross-section of the nation but some of them demonstrated yesterday that if there is a way to spoil their ballot, a sophisticated $14 million voting system will not stand in their way.

Some voters went to the trouble of getting absentee ballots, then paid 94 cents each to mail them in. Despite numerous warnings to sign the exterior envelope, several did not do so and their ballots won't even be opened.

Several ballots were disqualified because they undervoted (didn't vote for anybody) or overvoted (voted for more than one candidate). You need to know that there was only one race in each of two city council districts, and each race had either three or four candidates, so the voter's job was to vote for one, just one, only one, no more than one candidate.

One wise guy, apparently offended that he had only one race to vote in, wrote "what a waster of taxpayer's money" on the ballot. We saw that message only because the machine kicked his ballot out as an "undervote." Yep, he didn't even vote in the one race he could vote in.

Some ballots were mutiliated. They were printed on long sheets of paper, which in a normal election would be filled up with several lists of candidates and ballot questions. Some people cut off the bottom two thirds and mailed in the top third. This was a problem because the computer needed to "see" some codes at the bottom of the sheet. To make the ballots machine readable, elections officials duplicated them on full-sized sheets and ran the full-sized sheets through the machine.

To vote, you had to fill in the space between two short bars, connecting them to form a long bar next to your candidate of choice. This was too confusing for some people. Somebody drew an arrow next to his or her candidate. Another made one of the short bars even darker. The canvassing board gave them credit for their efforts and their votes were counted but the ballots had to be duplicated to be machine readable.

I mentioned that the voting system cost $14 million. We've used the system for less than two years. Somebody convinced somebody in Tallahassee that the system could be fooled, so the system will be discarded in favor of another multi-million-dollar system. The system now being used cannot even be sold for scrap. The counties are picking up half the cost of the new system even though the state forced the change on them. The new system will, trust me, be fooled by some fool.

Flori-duh, indeed.