Florida 13
There seem to be two points of view of the 18,000 missing votes in the 13th. Congressional District in Florida. One, which I and many other progressive bloggers have expressed several times and which was picked up by Paul Krugman in today's NY Times, is that the missing votes were due to glitches in (or deliberate tampering with) the voting machines.
In the second, Talk Left defends vigorously the idea that the error was due to bad ballot design and was the fault of the Democrats, not the Republicans or the Republican controlled machine manufacturers.
Talk Left has some additional evidence for his (?) position in subsequent posts today, so you should go back to the site if you want to keep informed on this. Among them is the fact that there were similar undervotes in low visibility races in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties.
There may be some truth to Talk Left's position, since 30% of the voters interviewed by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that they had been unable to find the ballot for that race on the machine. Perhaps it was just difficult to find because of poor ballot design. However, the Herald-Trib also found that 60 percent of the voters they surveyed said that they had voted in the race but the vote didn't show up on the summary screen. That doesn't sound like a ballot design problem to me. Furthermore, a preponderance of the missing votes were from voters who voted Democratic in other races. Why would poor ballot design disproportionately affect Democrats? [Yeah, I know. The thuglicans would say it's because the Dems can't read and are too stupid to figure things out for themselves. Just proves they were right to insist on literacy tests before allowingblack voters to vote.]
Further, I would think that ballot design on an electronic voting machine would largely be determined by the structure of the machine itself. Since I've never voted on one and never hope to, I don't really know.
I'm not willing to exonerate the Dems entirely -- they've certainly done it before, notably the ballot in 2000 where lots of people voted for Buchanan thinking they were voting for Gore --, but I still think the bulk of the evidence suggests the problem was with the machines, not the ballot or the voters.
In the second, Talk Left defends vigorously the idea that the error was due to bad ballot design and was the fault of the Democrats, not the Republicans or the Republican controlled machine manufacturers.
Talk Left has some additional evidence for his (?) position in subsequent posts today, so you should go back to the site if you want to keep informed on this. Among them is the fact that there were similar undervotes in low visibility races in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties.
There may be some truth to Talk Left's position, since 30% of the voters interviewed by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that they had been unable to find the ballot for that race on the machine. Perhaps it was just difficult to find because of poor ballot design. However, the Herald-Trib also found that 60 percent of the voters they surveyed said that they had voted in the race but the vote didn't show up on the summary screen. That doesn't sound like a ballot design problem to me. Furthermore, a preponderance of the missing votes were from voters who voted Democratic in other races. Why would poor ballot design disproportionately affect Democrats? [Yeah, I know. The thuglicans would say it's because the Dems can't read and are too stupid to figure things out for themselves. Just proves they were right to insist on literacy tests before allowing
Further, I would think that ballot design on an electronic voting machine would largely be determined by the structure of the machine itself. Since I've never voted on one and never hope to, I don't really know.
I'm not willing to exonerate the Dems entirely -- they've certainly done it before, notably the ballot in 2000 where lots of people voted for Buchanan thinking they were voting for Gore --, but I still think the bulk of the evidence suggests the problem was with the machines, not the ballot or the voters.
posted by walldon | 4:06 PM
1 Comments:
Maybe I am clueless, but I am at a total loss to understand what Big Tent Democrat is saying. What is the design flaw in the ballot? The race is right there, and the Republican is listed and the Democrat is listed. So if it didn't appear for many voters, that sounds like something other than a ballot design problem.
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