23) Spoiled Ballots

On "spoiled ballots" with Range and Approval (and old-style plurality) voting

The issue of "spoiled ballots" – ballots that do not obey the rules of the election system and which hence cannot be used – depends on a lot of factors – not just the election system's mathematical definition, but also how the election officials behave, what kind of voting machines they employ, and what settings they set their machines to.

...Although only 11% of Floridians are black, it was claimed in a speech in Congress on 21 Sept. 2004 that over half the state's invalid ballots appear to have been cast by blacks, and indeed a report by the US Civil Rights commission estimated that over half the invalid ballots USA-wide in 2000 appear to have been cast by blacks, even though blacks are 12% of the USA population. And nationwide data gathered by Harvard Law School Civil Rights Project again indicate that, of the 2 million ballots spoiled in a typical presidential election, about half are cast by minority voters.

Cleveland State University Professor Mark Salling analyzed ballots thrown into Ohio's electoral garbage can in 2004. Salling found that, "overwhelmingly," the voided votes come from African-American precincts.

The Ballots at the Back of the Bus

www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1686/

Ohio spoiled rotten

In a typical presidential election, 2 million ballots are marked “spoiled” and then chucked in the garbage, uncounted. But a dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes. In a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54 percent of spoiled ballots were cast by African-Americans. Florida is typical. Nationwide, the number of black votes “disappeared” into the spoiled pile is about 1 million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. “Overvotes” are where there are too many punches in the cards. And “undervotes” are where the hanging, dimpled and “pregnant” chads created by old punch card machines hang on. Machines can’t these kinds of undervotes, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem … if we’re allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore: by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a recount.

A Million Votes in the Electoral Trash

www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-88.htm#marker-1472559

"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted — chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-' round, not one single vote was cast for president — or, at least, none showed up on the machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.