Voting Machines Selecting Default Candidates

overThruster writes "Some voters in Las Vegas have noticed that Democrat Harry Reid's name is checked by default on their electronic voting machines. By way of explanation, the Clark County Registrar says that when voters choose English instead of Spanish, Reid's Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, has her name checked by default."

Comments

I abstain

[Robadob]

Surely there should be a box to abstain from voting (spoil your ballot), and this neutral should be checked by default.

Re:I abstain

[Hatta]

Really, all voters should be presumed to cast a "none of the above" ballot unless they specifically vote otherwise. Yes, even those who abstain by not showing up. Failure to even show up is a vote of no confidence in the system itself, which is a very important statement and deserves to be counted.

If the majority of the population doesn't even show up to vote, that is a de facto vote against the system. Nobody can claim a mandate to govern under such circumstances. Any government elected under such circumstances cannot be considered legitimate.

Re:I abstain

[cayenne8]

Err...exactly why is there a choice to vote in Spanish or English?

I mean...is it not a requirement for those coming to this country, to attain citizenship to show on the exams, a proficiency in English??

And you do have to be a citizen of the US in order to vote, don't you?

Re:I abstain

[bonkeydcow]

I am an election judge, I would be happy to provide the number of spoiled ballots. In my last election, there were 3. They were the results of either stray marks where the voter rested their pen in a box before checking a different box, and the machine wasn't sure which they meant, so they got a new ballot. The other case was where there were multiple candidates for 1 race (more than 2 candidates) and the voter chose more than one. If you would like I will post again next week with the spoiled ballot count for this election. We have to keep track of every single ballot, so knowing the number of spoiled ballots is trivial.

Re:I abstain

[snkline]

The US does not have an official language at the Federal level. If a state only wants to issue ballots in English, I believe they can, but they are also allowed to issue them in other languages if they want to. If Nevada wanted to they could provide you with options for every single written language in the world.

Abstaining creates fraud.

[AnonymousClown]

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.

Whoa!

Sometimes, when I don't like any candidate for a particular office, I abstain and thinking, maybe naively, that it will be noticed in the count - 20,000 votes cast but only 19,999 for the office of [whatever] . Selecting someone by default goes against my choice and I would consider that to be fraud. Period.

Not a default candidate it is a quick screen updat

[gurps_npc]

They did not build in a default candidate on purpose.

What happens is that when you touch the screen to select "English" as your language, it immediately goes to the next screen where you select your candidate. But the old button that said "English" is very close to where the new button that votes for candidates appears.

So if you are slow to remove your finger from the "English" button, your finger is already on the 'vote for candidate button', resulting in what the slow voter thinks is a default vote.

This is:

1. A bad GUI design. Grade D- in my opinion for putting the touch buttons so close and keeping the touch time too short/sensitive.

2. A bad tester, if they did any. Grade F. I mean really, was this that hard to catch?

3. Reminds me of moronic and illegal paper 'butterfly ballot' used in Florida not that long ago. Can't we get competent people to design these things?

Re:Explanation?

[Gravitron 5000]

The article implies that it's due to people keeping their finger on the touchscreen when they select a language preference. The location of Harry would be in the same screen location as English, where Sally would be in the same screen location as Spanish. Really, it's just sloppy coding, as you should wait until the user's finger is lifted before allowing another selection.

Re:*Citation Needed*

[shutdown -p now]

Portland residents will vote Nov. 2 on a proposal to give legal residents who are not U.S. citizens the right to vote in local elections

I'd just like to point out that one of the core founding ideas of your nation was "no taxation without representation".