Word: balloters
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...butterfly ballot flew away with the presidency this year, and it is well nigh time for election procedure to enter the 21st century along with the rest of the country. The signs of the time demand attention: The word "chad" has replaced "confetti" as the popular term for "small piece of paper" and thousands of votes, in counties from Palm Beach in Florida to Cook County in Illinois, were discarded due to appropriately labeled "voting irregularities" and double punching...
Such an electronic balloting system would provide rapid and nearly, if not entirely foolproof, ballot counting and certification. The system could be set up to keep a list of voters and whom they voted for. Hard-core civil libertarians might contest the possibility that such a system wouldn't maintain voter anonymity. But stipulations could be legislated to prevent disclosure of this information except in the event of a court order based on substantiated allegations of voter fraud...
Election after American election using the current procedures has been fraught with unnumbered acts of voter fraud and ballot stuffing, which such an electronic system would effectively counteract, if not prevent entirely...
...UNDERVOTES What are they? Undervotes are ballots that contain votes in some races but not all. Sometimes undervotes are intentional: The voter simply couldn't decide on a candidate, so that part of the ballot was left blank. But sometimes the machine reading a ballot misses a vote that was cast. That can happen when, for example, a chad isn't fully dislodged from a punch card. Florida has more than 61,000 undervoted ballots from this year's presidential race, a large but not shocking number for a state that uses old Votomatics...
...tell if an undervoted ballot was intended by the voter to register a vote? With most undervoted ballots - three-quarters, perhaps more - there's simply no indication of a vote. These ballots are true undervotes. But on punch-card ballots, even if a chad is hanging by only a corner or two, the counting machine might push the chad into its original place and wrongly call that ballot an undervote. You can tell only by looking...