Here is the list of the seventeen Democratic presidential candidates who will be listed on the Alabama 2020 presidential primary. The only name on the list who is not on in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary is Michael R. Bloomberg.
Candidates need 500 signatures to be on an Alabama presidential primary ballot. Any registered voter may sign.
Seventeen is okay for a primary in the spring, but 3 or 4 on the ballot in November can lead to voter confusion and possible spoiler candidates?? The hypocrisy is breath-taking. In the spring, someone please post a comment on this site if your hear the media saying that several of them shouldn’t be on the ballot “because they can’t win”…thank you.
A long list of candidates may have caused voter confusion in the 2016 Republican presidential primary in Texas.
A large number of candidates produced confusing ballot formats in 2000 in Florida.
A large number of candidates may caused problems with the Democrats “proportional” representation. With a 15% threshold you could end up with a winner with 20% of the vote getting all of the delegates, if 2nd place has 14.5%.
If you are too stupid to read a ballot, you shouldn’t vote. It’s not hard to read 4 or 5 or 16 names.
What if the format is confusing?
The Florida November 2000 ballot only had ten names running for president. That did not cause any confusion. What did cause confusion was the ballot in Palm Beach County in which the candidates’ names did not line up clearly with the punchcard hole. That kind of bad format can cause confusion even when there are only three or four candidates on the ballot for any particular office. That is why Congressman Royce was defeated for re-election in 1980 in California’s 11th US House district.
How many names in ONE column on most New Age optical scan ballots ???
How many screwed up ballots due to an office being in 2 or more columns and/or on 2 or more sides of a ballot ???
Any of the olde bedsheet ballot paper ballots still existing ???
— olde newspaper page sized ballots.
IE — How many States will be having Prez primary stuff on same ballot as Fed/State/Local primary stuff ???
THUS — T-H-E ALL TIME CHAOS *election* coming in 2020 — in how many States ???
— due to the EVIL TOP monarch/oligarch HACKS who CONTROL the USA.
@RW,
I presume you remember when San Francisco used punch card ballots.
A punch card has 80 columns and 12 rows. A particular column-row corresponds to a vote for a candidate or ballot issue.
Typically, a row will be used for a particular race (or races). Not all 80 columns will be used for that row. There is a guide booklet that exposes a particular row. The hard cardboard pages have the candidate names and an arrow pointing to where a pointed stylus is used to (hopefully) remove the perforated chads for the candidate. If the punch card is improperly placed in the punching device (upside down, or wrong end in, you can have misalignment, and incorrect punches.
Ordinarily the voting guide is on the left side page, and the right side will say something like “Turn Page To Continue Voting.
But in Palm Beach County placed the text on both left and right pages.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/uw-s3-cdn/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2016/03/04155331/3479146036_dda3e36872_b-1.jpg
They did this so the text for all 30 candidate/party names could be in a larger font size.
Some voters voted both the left and right pages. If given a choice between Reform, Socialist, Constitution, and Workers World who wouldn’t vote for the Reform Candidate, and cause an overvote.
Some voters may have scanned across from “Democratic” and voted in Hole 4. While it might be obvious to us that the 5 hole is for Gore/Lieberman, how do we know this? Did voters actually get instructions to punch next to an arrow, and if so did they listen? If you had been voting in NYC for decades, are you going to listen to anyone in Florida who doesn’t sound like Bernie Sanders? It was suggested that some with poorer eyesight might have voted for Joe Libertarian (many Jewish voters would have flipped the candidates if given the choice). It was also suggested that some voters might have voted for the first candidate on the ballot which was OK with the Democrats when they won 29 of 31 elections. There is also the extraneous instruction to “Vote for Group”.
In Duval County, the presidential race was on two consecutive pages. Pollworkers would instruct voters to be sure to vote every page, so that Democrats would vote in down-ballot races. This resulted in overvotes for president.
Some smaller counties used scanned ballots with a smaller form factor that worked for their county. The automatic formatting split the presidential race into two columns, with the second column offering a choice between Monica Moorehead and Write-in candidate (on a scanned ballot you can acually write the name of the candidate).
Palm Beach County did NOT have the largest share of apparent misvotes in 2000.
The Gore campaign focused on Palm Beach, not because of the butterfly ballot, but because of hopes of picking up hanging chad votes. Generally it is expected if 70% of voters want to vote for a candidate, that 70% of the hanging chads will go for that candidate (i.e. there is not a correlation between candidate choice and likelihood of a hanging chad). The motivation of the Gore campaign was not a high-minded let’s determine who won, but let’s win.
USA 2002 HAVA Act —
look for section written esp for FL MORONS – legis/exec/judic — mere what is a LEGAL vote.
Do legis/exec/judic HACK MORONS pay ANY attention to Consts, laws and court ops —
UNTIL a cop type shows up with an an indictment and an arrest warrant for the MORONS ???