Word: ballot
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...matter has still not been resolved. Ever since the recount was completed, the two campaigns have been fighting over crucial handful of ballots that are being challenged for one reason or another. On Friday, Franken won a round in court when a state elections board ruled that more than 600 rejected absentee ballots could be sorted and counted, and that 133 missing ballots from Minneapolis could be counted by examining the tapes from a ballot counting machine. Coleman promptly said he would challenge the ruling in court...
What if the 2000 presidential election had hinged not on a diverse, messy, weird and slightly creepy hick state like Florida but on the most organized, practical and cordial one in the Union: Minnesota? What if, instead of going to court after court over hanging chads and butterfly ballots and whether a recount should happen, election officials had just calmly looked at each ballot and tried to figure out what the voter wanted...
...been Minnesota instead of Florida in 2000, this is what we would have found out: Voters are idiots. You make a clear, statewide ballot with neat little ovals to fill in? Some voters will put in check marks and X's. They'll fill out two ovals. They'll mark one candidate's oval in ink, try to erase that mark and then put their initials next to their correction, even though there's a law on the books forbidding voters to sign their ballots, to prevent voter bribing. They'll scrawl something about taxes in that oval, or about...
...other major disagreement is over whether to count absentee ballots that were mistakenly rejected by local election officials around the state. When the Franken camp asked for and got a list of why each ballot was rejected, it discovered some ballots were thrown away for something besides the four legally specified reasons. So most of the reasonable election officials of the Minnesota counties started sorting the rejected ballots into five neat little piles, in case the state canvassing board decided (as it did Friday) that the ballots should count. One of those fifth-pile votes, the Franken camp discovered, belonged...
...phone signals on election day, which it claims will make mob takeovers of polling booths and vote-rigging - both hallmarks of elections in the past - more difficult. According to a poll by the Daily Star, a leading Dhaka English language newspaper, 95% of Bangladeshis believe they can cast their ballot without coercion...