The recent exhaustive recount in one of the contests for a seat on the Atlantic County Commission provided an excellent lesson in how not to vote.
There has been much public education about how to vote, including by political parties concerned that it be done for their candidates. Apparently, however, many people could use some basic advice about what not to do, especially when voting by mail.
The mail-in ballots from last year’s pandemic-restricted election required people to fill in ovals next to their candidates of choice. This has been a method for standardized forms and tests for decades, since it allows the results to be rapidly read and tabulated by a scanner.
This method of voting is also more secure and preferred in many places, since the paper ballots provide an accurate and persisting record. In voting on machines that produce no paper record, the New Jersey standard for now, voters must trust that their vote was properly recorded, and during a recount a machine can regurgitate the total but may not tell if anything went wrong and by how much.
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The county Board of Elections ran the commission-race ballots through the scanner again, and then examined closely the ballots that the scanner rejected. Some simply lacked proper marks on chosen candidates. Others were used by voters as a canvas for expressing themselves, typically with improper or misleading writing and crossings out that resulted in the ballots not being counted.
Some voters made disparaging comments about the party and candidates they oppose. Others crossed them out or even blackened them with a marker — sometimes ensuring that the scanner would see the ink in the ovals as votes for the opponents of their chosen candidates.
Many of the machine-rejected ballots had votes for three or four commission candidates, even though there were only two seats to be filled. The bipartisan recount officials rejected them again.
But where the clear intent of the voter could be determined — an oval with an X over it replaced by another filled in, or even a little note written on the ballot (which of course is only read if there is a recount) — the officials added their votes to the official tally.
Every vote rejected by the counting machine was because the voter had failed to follow the very clear and simple instructions on the ballot.
People often don’t bother to read instructions (including for their new products) because they believe they are capable of just going ahead, using common sense and adjusting as needed. And sometimes they do fine, which encourages skipping the instructions the next time. But sometimes they are wrong, they mess up, and suffer the consequences of this lesser form of that most ancient curse upon humans, hubris. In this case, anyway, all they’ve lost is their vote and the time and effort made in the failed attempt.
The recount didn’t make a bit of difference in the commission election, but it wasn’t quite a complete waste of the many thousands of dollars it cost. Since the bungled but recovered ballots remained in the same proportion as the machine-read ones, the recount provides objective proof that partisans for both major parties are equally likely to not follow instructions and fail their fundamental role in democracy.