On November 18, Texas election officials discovered an error on one of the vote tallies for State Senate in last week’s election. The error awarded thousands of Democratic straight-ticket votes to the Libertarian in the race. See this story.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
What if a voter used the straight ticket device because they were voting for that particular candidate (the libertarian Kathie Stone) and thought that since his views apparently were those of the democratic ticket they thought to support all of them. They have no way of knowing what was in the voters minds.
This should be taken to court and used as evidence as to why straight ticket devices should be illegal.
“This should be taken to court and used as evidence as to why straight ticket devices should be illegal.”
+1
5,324 of the Libertarian’s initial tally of 8,624 votes were straight-ticket votes. I never realized how big an advantage that gives to the major parties. (Of course, with alternatives such as IRV or ranked-choice voting, straight-party devices might be irrelevant, if the country could ever get there.)
With P.R. there would be NO straight ticket devices.
Obvious MAJOR failure to run test ballots with each straight party voted – to compare with candidate votes indicated.
Where is that MODEL ELECTION LAW ???– with a zillion test/security steps.
Demo Rep… the entire Proportional Representation is ONE GIANT straight ticket mechanism. You vote for the party you want to represent you, not a candidate. That couldn’t be anymore straight ticket.
Demo Rep… the entire Proportional Representation model is ONE GIANT straight ticket mechanism. You vote for the party you want to represent you, not a candidate. That couldn’t be anymore straight ticket.
Not necessarily, AMcCarrick. There are still different legislative bodies – Congress, State Legislature, Town Council, etc. and you could vote different parties in those. Not to mention offices that are by their nature single candidates, like President, Governor, Mayor, etc.
In my P.R. system the voters would be voting for ONE INDIVIDUAL candidate for each legislative body.
NO primaries. Election ballot access only via equal nominating petitions.
There could be and likely would be 2 or more candidates of the same party in the same election district.
Winners would have a Voting Power in the legislative body equal to the votes each gets from the voters and indirectly from losers via PRE-election candidate rank order lists.
ALL voters would be represented — i.e. both majority rule and minority representation.
Most foreign P.R. systems are about 95 percent very roughly accurate – via party HACK rank order lists.
The error was not in the straight ticket device per se, but in that Stone was identified as “Democratic” on the ballot, and that the straight ticket device was programmed to vote for any Democrat on the ballot.
There were around 8600 Democratic votes in the county, but only 5324 actually used the straight-ticket device. The other 3300 or so went down the ballot selecting everyone with a ‘D’ by their name. The pattern was similar for the Republican’s but with 21,500 straight Republican voters, and 11,799 straight ticket voters (i.e. both Republican and Democrat voters voted party down the ballot, with Democrats slightly more likely (62% vs 55%) to rely on the actual straight-ticket device.
It appears that Stone got many of the votes from straight-party voters who might claim that they were considering the merits of the candidates for each office (i.e. “Democrat good, Republican bad”). But she may have lost votes from voters who had used the Democratic straight ticket device.
On a voting machine, they would be told that they had not voted in the race.
Some would think, “No Democrat, skip this race”
Others would think, “I’ll vote for the not-Republican”
Others would think, “Ugh Libertarian, aren’t they communists”
Others would think, “Lois Kolkhorst is a great senator!”
Lois Kolkhorst is a quite likeable person, but Texas Senate districts are quite large, larger than a mere congressional district. There would be more personal cross-over in the northern part of the district where she was a representative.
Generally in the district, it appears that Kolkhorst received 25% to 35% of the Democratic vote, and about the same for Stone, and 40% to 50% skipping the race. The corrected result likely cost Kolkhorst about 1000+ votes, and gave Stone about 1000+ votes, which is a small amount for the district. Victoria County had about 11% of the votes in the senate district.