I thought the ‘intent rule’ was - if there is a partial / incomplete mark that fails to register - the candidate is awarded the vote. No mark - no vote.
Generally what you state is the rule, but in Hillary’s case there’s an exception. They will find thousands of “intent” votes for her on a hand recount.
We have the optical scanners here in my Florida county. If the scanner cannot read it (partial/incomplete mark) it will reject it, that is, it will spit it back out. The poll worker will visually check it in the presence of the voter to determine what the problem is. The precinct I was voting at had a problem with one of the printers making the ballots, the timing marks were off by 1/8". All ballots were barcoded, so a new ballot would be printed, and the old ballot was put in a double locked vault-box that only had a slit big enough for the old ballot. When the voting was over, the bad ballots were inventoried by the supervisor of elections office against the barcodes issued for that precinct. I was impressed. I thought they would just shred it but the poll worker said all ballots printed had to be accounted for.