Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:41:38 PM
Al Franken’s campaign now says that they intend on winning the election by pursuing the “undervote”
We first heard about “undervotes” in the controversy over the
election results in Florida in 2000. In that context, it made a little
more sense. A significant number of ballots carried votes from
down-ticket races but not for the presidential election. This set off
an effort to glean supposed voter intent through checking for “pregnant
chads”, those punch card selections that didn’t dislodge the paper chip
for the correct slot. The operational theory was that the punch-card
system somehow cheated the voter out of registering his/her vote,
despite the decades of use that punch-card systems had and the clear
instructions given to voters to punch all the way through the card and
check their ballots when finished.
In this case, it makes no sense at all. First, we use optical-scan
systems, not punch-card ballots, which are far simpler to complete.
Second, the Senate race was not at the top of the ballot. Obama voters
didn’t necessarily support Franken, . . .
Voters have a right not to cast votes in a particular race,
which is why the optical-scan tabulators do not check for
“undervotes”. In fact, “undervotes” do not exist; they’re a myth.
When voters choose not to support a candidate, they don’t cast votes
for the candidate, and if they don’t vote at all in a race, that’s
intentional. If they intended to vote in a race, they had ample
opportunity to do so. We Minnesotans spent a fortune on a balloting
system that captures voter intent in the best manner possible, and the
recount effort must not involve the wholesale second-guessing of that
clear statement.