On October 15, U.S. District Court Judge Red Rakoff refused to issue an injunction in Conservative Party & Working Families Party v New York State Board of Elections, 10 Civ. 6923, eastern district. This is the case in which those two parties complained that when a voter votes for the same candidate twice, once on each line, the machines are programmed to count only the vote for the party listed first on the ballot. See the judge’s 5-page order here. The plaintiffs want the machines programmed so that such a vote would be considered an overvote, and then the voter would be instantly notified of the overvote and asked to cast a new ballot.
For example, Andrew Cuomo is listed on the ballot three times as a candidate for Governor. He is listed as the Democratic nominee, the Independence Party nominee, and the Working Families nominee. Some voters will undoubtedly vote for him on all three lines. The Board of Elections will count that as one vote on the Democratic line.
The basis for the denial is that the plaintiffs filed the case too late. The order says “Plaintiffs (the political parties) have set forth substantial arguments in favor of their underlying complaint” but they “have slept on their rights and cannot at this late date seek the kind of onerous and potentially confusing relief envisioned..plaintiffs waited until six weeks before the election to file their complaint… the Court will not invoke the extraordinary remedy of a preliminary injunction at this time.” The judge also refused at this time to order elections officials to post signs in each polling place, warning voters not to double vote. He said the plaintiffs have not yet even furnished a sample of what the signs should say. UPDATE: plaintiffs did submit proposed wording for signs in polling places. They proposed “Do not vote for a candidate more than twice. If you wish to vote for a candidate who appears on more than one party line, then you should vote for the candidate on the party line you wish to support. If you vote for a candidate on more than one party line, then the candidate will receive credit for the vote, but the vote will automatically be credited to the first party listed on the ballot, and no other party will receive credit for the vote.”
This issue was not a problem in New York state in the past, because in the past almost all voters voted on mechanical voting machines, which mechanically made it impossible for voters to cast double-votes or triple-votes for the same candidate for the same office. But this year, those machines are gone, and paper ballots are being used. Thanks to Kimberly Wilder and IndependentPoliticalReport for this news.
There are important issues of ballot access and fairness in New York’s election system, and this isn’t one of them. Let them bitch and moan all they want, this is just “insider trading”. Screw these dependent surrogates for the major parties, and focus on how third (and fourth, and fifth, and sixth, etc.) parties can benefit from changes in New York’s election laws. And then let’s get to work on them.
The US Parliament New York Super-state Circuit #2
New York
http://www.usparliament.org/ss2.htm
Louis Binetti [Green], Vincent D’Agostino [Republican], Dave Holland [Democratic], Lawrence Durfey [Independent], Juan T. Morel [Non-Party], Brian Carroll [Pot], Dank Treess [Pot], Gogh [Gogh], King Shabazz [Info. Not Avail.]
But the paper ballots voted at polling places are fed into scanners that should be able to detect the overvote.
It would actually be surprising that this type of vote is not detected as an overvote, given that otherwise you would have to permit someone to vote for Cuomo on 1, 2, or 3 lines, but detect a vote for Cuomo and Paladino as being a separate vote on two separate lines. Also the combination of party endorsements vary from race to race. It is so much easier to program to detect too many marks in a single column. Even if the vendors had been required to permit this type of con-fusion, it would probably be beyond the capabilities of New York elections officials to enter the information correctly in the ballot description.
Paper ballots cast by mail would likely already had this problem. Arguably, such a vote should count for no party, since while it possible to determine the intent of the voter as to candidate, it can not be determined with respect to party.
Again – how about those fractional votes —
1/2, 1/3, etc. ??? —
due to the party hack MORONS in the NY party hack gerrymander Legislature.
How many court cases are starting on 3 Nov 2010 to get to the SCOTUS party hacks BEFORE ballots get printed in 2012 ???
…you build on a democratically illegit electoral committee like the NY Elections Commission or the democratically illegit US Supreme Court, you’re just going to encounter frustration. You may as well build a house on a sandy beach.
However, if you build on a democratically legitimate 100-member committee like any of the four 100-member elected USA Parliament committees, you have a strong foundation on which to build.
The former however, does guarantee a permanent stream of material on which to base your tears, and the commentary sections of Ballot Access News sporadically provides the medium.
I agree with Jim Riley. The New York vote-counting machines could be programmed to detect any type of over-vote, and then the machine could make a warning tone, and the polling place official could tell the voter, “You overvoted; do you want to try again or do you want me to just submit your ballot as it is?” That is what most states do when a voter over-votes, and that is presumably what happens in New York when a voter casts a vote for two different candidates for the same office.
Since the scanner already warns of a overvote if the voter selects two different candidates it could do it for any vote. The paper ballot says “Vote for One”. So if the ovals of more then one should be an OVERVOTE. The scanner already warns the vote about overvotes and allows the voter the get the ballot back, void it, and get a new ballot. Since this is the first time for this system, I thing the absentee ballots will not be hand counted but put through the scanner. All ballots can be counted in close votes and there will be an audit where a fixed % of ballots will be counted in all elections to verify against machine totals.
Remember, New York is a FUSION state, where all the votes for a candidate on all the party lines are added to the candidates total.
The interesting part of this issue is the wording of the complaint and the judges order. The complaint says: New York Election law 9-112(4) provides that the vote is counted towards the first party on the ballot line. But that is not how the optical scanner is programmed. The vote will go to the first filled in oval on the line. So if two minor party ovals are filled in, the first parties oval will be counted.
Ex. – Andrew Coumo is on the Democratic, Independence Party (IP), and the Working Family Party (WFP) lines for Governor. If the oval for the IP and WFP were filled in, IP would get the vote.
Why is this important? In New York, the Governor race determines if a party gets ballot status for the next four years by getting at least 50,000 votes. And the vote totals determine the parties position on the ballot.
Pingback: US District Court Judge Won’t Issue Injunction in Conservative/Working … – Ballot Access | Conservatives for America
I have a much higher regard than Pete does for fusion and for the parties which regularly or sometimes use it to advantage. Although I agree that this is not the most important issue of ballot access or fairness, it IS an important one. And as Jim, Richard, and Mike point out, it is a problem that bears easy remedy. It will be a bloody shame if as a result of this either the CP or the WFP loses its ballot status.
#10 I was wrong.
The certification standards at:
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/NYSBOE/law/Regulations/Part6209VotingSystemsStandards.pdf
6209.1(ag) specifically requires that the test deck of ballots include cases where more than one ballot line for a candidate is selected so that it can be verified that the vote is tallied according to state law (first line marked).
and 6209.3(a)(3) requires such a vote to be tallied in compliance with state law.
It’s way too late to be reprogramming at this point. The parties could still seek a hand recount – since it is unlikely that state law reflects voter intent. Even if there was some sort of warning at the polls, it is unlikely to be totally effective – so the parties might still need to seek a recount (and the state could argue that the warning had been sufficient).
A longer term solution would require a change in state law.
It could make such a vote (semi)invalid, such that it would be detected as a voter error, but would still be counted, which would handle mail absentee ballots, or those cast by insistent voters. You could simply not attribute such votes for party qualification, or split them. The voting system would need to be able to record the various party combinations.
Or you could simply eliminate party qualification based on the gubernatorial vote. NY has voter party registration.
Or you could have a separate ballot item to express party support.
Again — most RATIONAL scanner ballots have separate boxes for
1. Straight party voting.
2. Each office box — with candidates and their party labels or independent status.
— i.e. in fusion States each candidate nominated by a different party would have different ovals.
What century will the NY party hacks get RATIONAL ???
@Dave Gillespie, in the interest of full disclosure, if you’re a New Yorker, what’s your party registration?
Pete,
I am not a New Yorker. I live in South Carolina, but I follow NY
politics closely. This is due in part to my interest in and support for third parties and their right to participate electorally and in the “marketplace of ideas.” That marketplace of ideas is a lot less free than most Americans think it is.
Dave
My son is attending the College of Charleston, in his second year. He loves it, as I did when I was in the Navy many years ago and stationed in North Charleston.
I think people know that electoral politics isn’t democratic. They just also “know” that “there’s nothing anyone can do about it” and “fighting city hall” doesn’t win you anything. That “reality” is changing by force of circumstance more than by any of our reasoned, rational argumentation. People could ignore politics in this country for 50 years and still get by. They can’t do so any longer.
#11. It is interesting about what the test decks should test. I watched the 2/18/2010 NY BOE meeting and the Head of Operations had to explain to the Board Commisioners that is not how the scanner was programmed.
Here is my blog entry about this topic:
http://ipview.blogspot.com/2010/09/nyc-new-voting-system-and-fusion-voting.html
Pete,
I am teaching a course on Parties and Interest Groups at College of Charleston this semester. Small world. Charleston has got to be one of the one of the loveliest and most interesting cities in the country.
I very much agree with what you say about the importance of politics and of rejecting a nothing-I-can-do-about-it attitude.
Dave
#16 The law apparently predates the new scanners, so perhaps it relates to by-mail absentee ballots. When a ballot gets rejected by a scanner as invalid, the normal practice is to prepare a new ballot that fixes the error so the scanner will accept it – this may require an elaborate level of record keeping in case a recount needs to look at the original. In the case of an actual overvote, it gets converted to an undervote – unless you can figure out what the voter intent was by other marks. If you have a ballot with 10 races on it, with an overvote in one race, it is probably more reliable to get the scanner to count all races; vs counting 9 of 10 races automatically, and the 10th by hand; or counting all 10 races by hand on defective ballots.
So I suspect that to count the first line was the simplest way to correct a ballot. It got counted for the correct candidate which was most important – and any automated interpretation of voter intent as to which party they preferred is probably wrong.
@Dave G., my son called me yesterday afternoon. I’m going to ask him to look you up. His name is Cavan, and he’s a theatre and social studies major.