I’m from Alabama. I don’t know why the ballot was arranged the way it was.
The only question is “How many votes were cast for one Straight Party Voting, then the candidate for the other party was selected?”
I don’t know what Alabama’s rules for ballot counting are. Does “Straight Party” override the individual selections? Do individual selections override “Straight Party”.
Recounting should not be that huge a deal. We have optical scanners. You can put a ballot through a machine about every 3 seconds.
All that being said, I don’t expect 21,000 votes to be made up with that recount OR when absentee and military ballots are counted.
After doing some research:
It appears that voter intent has been determined in cases where the straight ticket choice and the candidate choice differ, is that the candidate choice rules. I found this on a couple court decisions, none specifically concerned with Alabama.
During the day (and before any votes were counted) the Secretary of State of Alabama, a Republican, said this is how the votes would be counted if the voter contradicted himself.
So, Roy Moore has to hope that a lot of people wrote his name in (even though it was on the ballot) and there are still a lot of overseas and provisional votes for him, yet to be counted. These things seem impossible.
Documenting voter fraud (e.g., people brought in from out of state who were not qualified to vote in Alabama) seems another possibility. But, this is almost impossible to prove in real time.
The man lost by 1.5 percent of the vote. This is a big margin from the standpoint of challenging an election.