Palm Beach municipal elections see new ballot problems

AP ^ | April 1, 2002 | AP

[summer]

Palm Beach municipal elections see new ballot problems

Monday, April 1, 2002

Associated Press

WEST PALM BEACH — Elections officials say about 3 percent of ballots cast in the March 12 municipal elections in Palm Beach County were improperly marked.

In the county that made chads famous in the 2000 election, the problem shows that voters will have to get used to changes.

The county is now using touch screen voting as well as new ballots for absentee voters.

During the municipal elections, the 55 ballots, which accounted for about 3 percent of the total number, were hand counted, officials said.

When scanners kicked out the unreadable ballots, elections workers were forced to look at each one individually on election night. They then had to determine voter intent and fill out a duplicate ballot readable by the machines.

But the process for fixing the 55 ballots took 90 minutes, raising concern over massive delays in the higher-turnout fall elections if similar percentages of voters botch their ballots.

Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore will try to prevent voter confusion by sending a detailed instruction brochure to absentee voters before the fall elections.

[weegee]

It sounds to me like it was mail-in ballots that were improperly marked for votes (as the notice will be going to absentee voters and the scanner had a hard time reading the ballots).

Then again, some Floridians had no qualms about throwing out military absentee ballots that were "improperly" filled out (even though there were no issues with their vote choices, just the voter identity).

Is the 3% voter error within the margin of error for Florida elections? Typically this is the case for states in the US.

[weegee]

Perhaps they should just come out and only list Rep-ugly-cans. Those are the only votes they count, anyway.

I'm confused, I could have sworn that Frodo was a hobbit and not a TROLL.