Colorado Newspaper Story on How 22 Presidential Candidates for President Makes Difficulties for Preparing Ballot

This Colorado newspaper story discusses the November 8 ballot in Colorado, which lists 22 presidential candidates. No state in history ever before had more than 16 presidential candidates on a general election ballot, and that old record was also set by Colorado in both 2012 and 2008. Except for Colorado, the largest number of presidential candidates in November was the Iowa 1992 ballot, which had 14.


Comments

Colorado Newspaper Story on How 22 Presidential Candidates for President Makes Difficulties for Preparing Ballot — 5 Comments

  1. There were 14 choices (13 candidates plus uncommitted) on the Texas Republican primary ballot. In some counties this led to the ballot being spread across multiple screens. Some voters apparently voted on the second screen. On typical DRE machines, you make a correction by selecting another candidate. To prevent overvotes, the original vote is erased.

    So a voter may have voted on the first page, paged to the second page, and then voted on the second page. Alternatively, some voters may have paged through to the second page and become confused.

  2. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants, 22 presidential candidates or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” Fixed it for you Bernie Sanders.

  3. My local scanner ballot is a mere 20 inches high (with 3 fold lines – 4 parts) with about 65 lines in 3 columns — with 2 sides — i.e. a mere 65 x 3 x 2 = 390 lines — about 85 percent filled with office boxes and candidate names —

    I.E. could have a mere about 32 Prez/VP names in 1 column.

    Can Democracy survive the Nov 2016 gerrymander election in the USA ???
    P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.

  4. I looked at several sample ballots in different Colorado counties. Some counties do a better job at laying out an efficient ballot than others. Why Colorado doesn’t have a uniform ballot appearance is beyond me. But on none that I looked at did it appear that the list of presidential candidates spill over into another column, let alone another page.

  5. Ballots could be printed serially on a one thousand foot roll of paper. That roll could be mounted in a machine to scroll a random unvoted ballot into a window for the voter to make their choices. The machine would then mark that space on the ballot roll as used and scroll a clean ballot for the next voter to use. This scrambling of voted ballots on the roll would assure voter anonymity. Individual ballot spaces could be of any length (up to, say, 500 feet!) and it be would very, very difficult to substitute ballots without substituting an entire roll of counterfeit fraudulent ballots. The paper in the roll could contain a fraction of recycled shredded U S currency to authenticate the roll’s legitimacy.
    Just an idea I have been analyzing for sometime.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.