[EL] Palm Beach County

[Charles Stewart III]

Thanks to Steve for the scanned ballot.

When I've looked at down-ballot races from the perspective of residual votes, I've noticed that judicial retention races are an exception to the general trend of down-ballot "drop-off".  While drop-off tends to increase the further down the ballot one goes, voters choose to participate in these races at a higher rate than other down-ballot races.  Therefore, I would anticipate greater drop-off as a consequence of the mistake, since some voters who otherwise would have voted in these races will overlook them.

Charles

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Stewart III
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Housemaster of McCormick Hall

Department of Political Science
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E53-449
30 Wadsworth Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts   02139

Office:  617-253-3127

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Kolbert
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 5:30 PM
To: law-election at UCI.edu
Subject: [EL] Palm Beach County


For those interested, I've attached a scanned image of an unmarked absentee ballot from Palm Beach County that contains the printing error. (It comes in two files because this scanner could not scan the entire 9.75" x 18" ballot page all at once.)

As you can see, the ballot doesn't really look misprinted at all -- it's very hard to tell there's an error even when you know to look for it, which may be how Palm Beach County officials never noticed the misprint until it was too late. (If you still can't find it, look in the second column for the race for Tax Collector. Under that race, there are judicial retention races -- but there is no heading that says "JUDICIAL RETENTION /MONTENER AL JUEZ," as there are headings for every other race.)

This is an unfortunate error by a vendor, but it's important to note that this error probably won't cause any voter confusion, even if Palm Beach County's plan to tabulate the misprinted ballots will cause headaches for the election administration staff. In other words, this is not another butterfly ballot.

Steve Kolbert
(202) 422-2588
steve.kolbert at gmail.com<mailto:steve.kolbert at gmail.com>
@Pronounce_the_T

On Oct 21, 2012 12:36 PM, "Rick Hasen" <rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu>> wrote:
>

> Holy Cow! They've Already Screwed Up the Ballots in Palm Beach County
> Posted on October 19, 2012 9:14 pm by Rick Hasen
>
> A major theme of The Voting Wars is that we learned the wrong lessons after the Florida 2000 debacle.
>
> Here's some good evidence at ground zero of the 2000 battles: Palm Beach County:
>>
>> The problem started when an Arizona company that printed the ballots failed to include a heading over the merit retention elections for judges on the Florida Supreme Court and 4th District Court of Appeal. The mistake was discovered and corrected after the first 60,000 ballots were printed and 50,000 mailed.
>>
>> It was soon discovered that the error would affect all races on the flawed ballot. When the header was inserted, the races on about half of the ballots shifted, Bucher said. The shift will make it impossible for tabulation machines to count the votes on an estimated 27,000 of the bad ballots. Saying it would be impossible to program machines to read the defective ballots, Bucher said the only alternative is to duplicate them by hand.
>>
>> Late Friday, she sent Detzner a report, outlining how the process will unfold Monday when workers begin opening, sorting and copying the roughly 15,000 absentee ballots that have been returned. Of the total, she said about 8,600 are flawed.
>
>
>
> Posted in election administration, The Voting Wars | Comments Off
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