Touch Screen Voting Trouble in Florida

usn2fsu03 writes "Here we go again with another election controversy in South Florida. Touch screen voting was used in a State House election that was won by twelve votes. Unfortunately, there were 134 people who went through the process of checking in to vote, but either did not vote or cast a vote that was not counted. Without a paper trail it is anyone's guess as to what those voters' intentions were. Obviously, there is work to be done in the Election Supervisor's office before November comes around."

Comments

Re:Voter intent?

[aborchers]

Can someone please explain to me when this became a land where we had to determine what a voter intended and not what he actualy voted for (or in this case didn't vote for).

In the case of Florida, it's a matter of law that the intent of the voter is to be honored. The intent stipulation arises out of an acknoledgement that all recording systems are subject to innacuracies, and that the noblest thing to do is to honor the will of the voter, rather than the output of the machine.

This is obviously an extreme example, but it should be illustrative:

Imagine a ballot-punching machine where a peg for one of the candidates breaks an hour before the polls close. Noone notices this and the voters go on pressing the button for that candidate until closing time, assuming they voted for him or her.

In the end, the vote count is wrong, underrepresenting that candidate's support. In this case, the intent of the voters was not registered even though they acted in good faith and without making any mistakes.

It is this type of scenario that the intent law is intended to remedy. The will of the voters is paramount to the output of a machine that can be tampered with, broken, or buggy.

Re:Voters' "Intent"??

[aborchers]

I'm sorry, but since when was any vote-counting system designed to interpret what a voter's intent was, beyond correctly-cast votes?

Vote-counting systems (in the big sense of end-to-end counting and certification, not just talking about balloting hardware) in Florida must honor the intent of the voter as a matter of law.

The law is designed to address the array of things that can go wrong with the voting process and equipment, and ensure that the intent of the voter is paramount to any vagueries introduced by the equipment or counting procedures. How anyone could think this is a bad thing (unless they were in the process of exploiting such vagueries) is beyond me...