The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Dallas County, Texas v Texas Democratic Party, 10-755, at its January 21 conference. This is the case in which the lower court had ruled that Dallas County can’t continue using iTronic vote-counting machines unless the Voting Rights Section of the U.S. Justice Department approves those machines. The Democratic Party had filed the lawsuit because those vote-counting machines have a tendency to cause under-votes, for voters who use the straight-ticket device. If a voter uses the straight-ticket device and then votes for one individual candidate from the same party, that erases the original action of using the straight-ticket device. The device attempts to explain this to the voter, but in practice, the instructions are not effective.
Texas, and all states, would avoid these problems by simply repealing the straight-ticket device.
Another way to avoid these problems is to hand count paper ballots in public. Hackable software does not belong anywhere near a ballot box.
every body that votes must readd and write english first for my grandpareents andd parents had to so did i too. eenglish sould be our nationaal langguage!
Well said Mr. Lewis…or is it Mr. Falwell?
In States with rational e-scanners the office box vote prevails over the straight party box vote.
NO brains in Texas capable of copying another State’s scanner codes ???
Keep suing the MORON bureaucrats (and even rotted State regimes) — to bankrupt them into having rational voting systems.
#1 The paper ballot in Harris County this last election was about 5 feet long, with dozens of ballot styles, and they are in 3 languages.
So if someone early votes, the election officials would have to go find the correct ballot, they would have to make 90 marks. When the ballot was counted for each race, the election judge would have to find the current office down on the 3rd page, check up on the first page for a straight ticket vote, and then place the ballot in the correct stack.
Let’s imagine that a ballot can be processed in 5 seconds (remember these are 5 foot long sheets of paper), and there are 500 ballots in the precinct. A race could be counted in 42 minutes. 90 races means 3750 minutes or 62.5 hours. After an election judge has worked 12+ hours on election day, you’re going to have them count ballots for the next 3 days?
Compare to the use of DREs, where you can choose your language of choice, and which brings up the correct races for you, provides a summary screen of your votes and can be counted in milliseconds.
# 6 Most rational States do NOT have the INSANE ballots that TX has.
See Oregon — ALL mail ballots using scanners.
Oregon survives.
Some corrections. Dallas does not use eSlate voting machines. It uses iVotronic voting machines. Your use of “vote-counting” machines implies that they are scanners. Both the eSlate and iVotronic are electronic voting machines which present the races on an LED screen. The iVotronic voting machine is a touch screen system, the eSlate uses a scroll dial (somewhat similar to a mid-20th century phone dial) to navigate through the ballot, and a button that is pressed to select or deselect a candidate.
The Democrats had previously challenge the eSlate voting machines, which are used in Harris, Tarrant, and Travis counties and many others. They lost that case in the Western District of Texas (they were challenging the use of eSlate in Travis County). That decision was affirmed by the 5th Circuit.
The Democrats then filed suit against Dallas County in the Northern District of Texas, on grounds that the use of iVotronic voting machines violated Section 5 and 2 of the VRA (the eSlate lawsuits were not based on the VRA). The Section 2 claim that the iVotronic system was racially discriminatory were dismissed by the district court. The Section 5 claim was heard by a 3-judge panel, which ruled that Dallas County had not sought pre-clearance from the USDOJ for a change in election procedures from the baseline procedure from 1972 with regard to the manner in which straight-ticket votes were tallied. Dallas had of course pre-cleared use of the iVotronic voting machines, with their submission explaining the basis mechanism of straight ticket voting on the iVotronic voting machines.
Your use of “tendency to cause” and “in practice, etc” could lead some to infer that there is some defect or electronic failure in the eSlate devices.
On Texas paper ballots, the straight-party box is at the top of the party column, with the boxes for party candidates below in each office row (I’ve never actually seen a paper ballot in Texas, but this is my understanding). A voter may override the straight ticket box on any race. Any office vote always takes precedence over the straight-party vote.
If your straight-ticket party does not have a candidate for a particular office, then you must affirmatively vote for that office. The same is true for nonpartisan offices, ballot proposition, and special elections that are concurrent with general elections.
Voters have a right to affirmatively abstain from voting for any office. If they have voted a straight-ticket on a paper ballot, they have to make extraneous markings and hope that election officials interpret their intent correctly. So if you wanted to vote for every Democrat but your ex-spouse, you would either have to not vote a straight-ticket, and select every candidate but your ex-spouse; or vote a straight-ticket and then make comments indicating that you don’t want to vote for that office, and hope your intent is understood.
A paper ballot doesn’t say how it will be interpreted, so if your party didn’t have a candidate for some office, you would have to notice that. A paper ballot is also easy to modify, so if a voter voted a straight ticket, but not any offices, it is simple to change his vote for that office to a cross-over vote. So a more wary or cautious voter would go ahead and vote for every office. The Democrats euphemistically characterize this as an “emphasis vote”, but it is really to prevent election officials from changing votes.
On the eSlate (and presumably the iVotronic) you can change your vote by selecting another candidate – which is intended to prevent overvotes. To erase a vote, you select the candidate again (on a paper ballot you would either have to get a new ballot, or write instructions).
On the eSlate, if you vote a straight-ticket, the the votes for individual candidates of the party are highlighted, so when you scroll down to the office it shows you voting for the candidate, just as if you had actually voted for the candidate.
If you want to vote for a candidate of another party, you simply select that candidate, and the vote for the party candidate is erased.
If you vote for the party candidate a second time, the vote for the candidate is erased, just as if you had voted for the candidate, and then voted for candidate a second time. On the eSlate, if the selection was because of a straight-ticket vote, a warning screen is displayed, which requires confirmation of the vote change.
So the essence of the Democrat claim is that pointing a finger at a touch-screen in two places is equivalent to making two X marks on a paper ballot, and that Dallas County has changed their method of counting straight party votes, without getting pre-clearance from the USDOJ.
If this were true, it would imply that they are counting the votes in a manner contrary to Texas law, even though Texas has approved their use as complying with Texas law.
The Texas claim is that the electronic voting devices provide a graphical interface which assists the voter, preventing overvotes, highlighting races that the voter may have skipped. For the straight ticket voter this includes races that were nonpartisan, ballot measures, concurrent special elections, or where the voter’s party did not have a candidate.
It also provides an interpretation of how the combination of straight-ticket vote, and individual races will be interpreted.
It in effect pre-marks office votes for straight ticket voters, and provides a way by which a voter may unambiguously affirmatively abstain from voting for an office.
The resulting ballot is counted in accordance with state law.
If one were to duplicate the interaction with a paper ballots, a summary screen would have to show that a voter did not actually vote for a particular race, regardless whether a voter had voted a straight ticket box. It would also allow overvotes, and would not highlight votes that were due to the straight party vote, and would not have a mechanism for erasing a vote.
#6 Texas is not Oregon.
Jim, thanks for the correction about the type of machine Dallas County uses. I corrected the post.
# 7-8 Perhaps Texas party hacks will rethink the joining with the Union in 1845 ??? — and resume being an independent sovereign nation-State — aka Lone Star State ???
The D.C. Donkeys would surely like TX Elephants to be OUT of the Union.
How easy is it to subvert the computer codes in those DRE machines ??? Inquiring minds need to know.
See the Landslide L.B.J. win [aka ballot box stuffing] in south Texas in circa 1948 — result MILLIONS dead in the Vietnam/SE Asia WAR.