Last month, the Conservative and Working Families Party of New York state filed a federal lawsuit, challenging the state’s policy on counting ballots when a voter casts two votes for a single office, and both votes are for the same candidate. The state says it will count such ballots as votes for the party with the higher position on the ballot. For example, if a candidate is the nominee of the Republican Party and the Conservative Party, and a voter votes for that candidate under both party lines, only the Republican vote would count.
The lawsuit does not say what the state should do in that situation, but it argues that the state’s policy is discriminatory and unconstitutional.
On September 29, the Independence Party of New York city filed an amicus curiae brief on the side of the Conservative and Working Families Party. The state officers of the Independence Party seem not to have taken a position on the lawsuit. The officers of the Independence Party of New York city and the officers of the statewide Independence Party are somewhat hostile to each other.
What should happen is the scanning machine should consider this an “OVERVOTE” and give the voter the choice to return the ballot and get a new one or accept the ballot and lose their vote for the office in question. This is what happens when the voter picks two different candidates for the same office.
How about those fractional votes 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc. ???
How many party hack math MORONS are there in the NY gerrymander legislature ???
There is more to this problem. The lawsuit uses the wording in the law that the major party gets the vote. But that is not how the optical scanner was programmed. The first filled in oval from top to bottom or left to right gets the vote. So if the voter selected the same candidate from two minor parties, one of the minor parties will get the vote. This is a problem when the vote is for governor and the party needs 50,000 votes to be a qualified party.
Another new problem is write-ins. If the voter writes in the name of a party candidate we still do not know if it will be added for the fusion vote. There is 2.5m votes that do not belong to a party, called BLANKS, in NY. Since it is easier to do a write-in in the new paper ballot optical scanner voting system, they could do the write-in as a party protest vote.