Spoiled Ballot

[VotingPatterns]

You have the opportunity to vote. In some cases, you are being forced to vote. However, you don't like any of your choices and you resent either the poverty of your current selection or the entire voting system at large. You also more than likely are in voting system lacking abstention.

Therefore, you decide to spoil your ballot in protest. Most ballots have vigorous rules on how to unambiguously select one of the choices. A SpoiledBallot breaks those rules and makes it unclear what you are voting for. The idea is that if the number of spoiled ballots is very high, the election could hardly be seen as valid or fair.

Methods may include voting for all the choices, voting for none, marking your vote incorrectly (say, a big happy face instead of an X), voting for a phantom choice, etc.

Voting for a phantom candidate is a common practice when a particular popular person has been banned from the election by an totalitarian government.

But, even though a vote may have a landslide of spoiled ballots, the voting system usually will go through with the results anyway. So, the protest is largely symbolic.

Also, in any large scale vote, there are usually many unintentional spoiled ballots. Sometimes, these aren't accidents as the returning officers who count the ballots may be biased towards one point of view or the other. This happened in the last Quebec ReferendumVote?, for instance.

"Instant history" note: the SpoiledBallot is having an impressive effect on the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. Votes in other states were so even that the entire election hinges on the vote in the state of Florida. It looks as if Florida is so even that the margin of victory is in the hundreds of votes. However, in one Florida county, over 19,000 spoiled ballots were found. Nobody suspects intentional spoiled ballots (everyone believes that most of those voters wanted to give a legal vote), and one candidate is challenging election results ```because''' of these spoiled ballots.

The above was accurate as of Nov. 13, 2000. Please update this page when more information is available.

Could a US or even better, Florida, resident please explain to this confused Brit how your voting works at the level of the ballot box? There wasa lot of confusing talk about "chad" on the BBC this morning. Does this mean that balloting is by some sort of punched card? For you info, in UK elections we make a cross with a pencil in the appropriate box(es). All general election votes are counted by hand.

The method of voting is determined independently by each County. In Palm Beach County in Florida (as in about a third of the US), a punch card is used. The punch used to mark the card is rectangular, and actually removes a rectangular section (the chad) of the card.

If the chad is not fully detached, it is left hanging onto the card, and can confuse the machine which counts the ballots. Florida holds that in a hand count, as long as at least one corner of the chad is detached from the card, the vote counts. (It may be possible to have all four corners still attached, if the punch tool was only gently pressed against the card.) I thought it counted if 3 of the 4 corners were detached?

This is all as according to the NewYorkTimes, 13 November 2000.

Unfortunately, Florida state law does not define what constitutes a valid vote. Most ballots are machine-counted, so the machine only counts those in which the chad has actually been removed. If a single corner is still attached, the chad may remain in place and not be counted automatically. Manual counting is controversial because both sides believe that it will count many previously ignored votes and change the results. Those who are doing the counting have decided that in this case, a single detached corner is sufficient, but a noticeable depression in the chad which does not detach any corners is not.

Apropos of nothing, there can be great fun to be had with a SpoiledBallet? when it comes to HighlyStructured? meetings such as with LaborUnions?. There was a case a decade or so ago where I worked (before I got there, actually) where the decision was being made whether to include engineers in the union (a contentious issue in many areas where computer people are considered to be "professional" or even "management" in the hierarchy and therefore unable to unionize). The engineers were balloted (and let me tell you, there were considerable fights here too, since some engineers were on vacation, but the union rules required all members to vote at once) and the ballots were officially read. The ballot itself involved the question of whether the engineer wanted to join the union with checkboxes for Yes and No. As you might expect, a few people were unable to make a binary choice, so there were a few ballots where the reader picked it up, looked at it, looked up and intoned either, "Both boxes checked" or "No boxes checked" and set aside the ballot in a separate pile. Well, the poor girl reading them picked one up, turned bright red, and with pleading eyes, asked if she had to read all of the ballots. She was told that indeed, policy required the reading of all to make it official. Which is why, in the end, the vote got deadlocked with 13 votes of Yes, 13 votes of No, 2 votes of both boxes checked, 1 vote with no boxes checked, and one vote of "Both boxes checked and the words Blow Me written across the face" (ultimately, after bringing in the engineers on vacation and a lot of harrumphing over the still-tied vote, the decision was made that engineers did not have to join the union, but were covered retroactively if at any time they did decide to join, which resulted in most engineers only joining when they decided to raise a grievance).

CategoryVoting