October 24, 2004
Cuyahoga, OH Ballot Irregularities
In order to get maximum exposure, I am writing them right now:
Dear Powerline,
This is not a resolved issue! Here is Jaqueline Maiden's own quote from your site:
Absentee voters are supposed to ignore the arrows and punch out the chad that matches the candidate's number, Jacqueline Maiden, a coordinator with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, said Wednesday. The punch cards and arrows are designed to work with machines used by people who vote in person on Election Day, she said.
"When the ballots are placed in the machines, the numbers line up with the arrows," she said, sliding a sample ballot into a machine similar to the ones that will be used Nov. 2 to show how it lined up correctly.
The clear implication is that these ballots are simply ballots disassembled from the actual voting machines. Think about this. When voting via machine THE ONLY HOLE BUSH VOTERS WILL BE PUNCHING IS HOLE 14, NOT HOLE 4. They will follow the arrow to the punch hole and unless a different ballot card will be used (a possibility of near zero since the Cuyahoga election officials clearly didn't go out of their way to produce an absentee-voter-friendly version) only hole 14 can possibly be there!
This is an unmitigated crisis in my book. What you have here is an unresolvable cognitive dissonance: is it 4 or 14? is it 4 or 14? can I punch both? why is 4 not punched when I just voted for George Bush? Unless these ballots are fixed now, no amount of cleverness or mental gymnastics can assure the voter that he has successfully voted for George Bush.
CORRECTION: I have gone back and looked again at the ballot picture at Powerline, and while the gist of my post stands, the punch numbers in question are 4 and 14, not 2 and 12. I have already corrected the errors above.
Posted by nopundit at October 24, 2004 06:06 PM