Judge Sets Start Date for Ballot Bubble suit; Trial Begins Jan. 31 (Frye)

[Liberty Belle]

Judge Sets Start Date For Ballot-Bubble Suit
Trial Begins Jan. 31

POSTED: 8:57 am PST January 24, 2005
UPDATED: 4:28 pm PST January 24, 2005

SAN DIEGO -- A state judge on Monday set a Jan. 31 start date for a trial to determine whether Dick Murphy should be ousted as San Diego's mayor and replaced with write-in candidate Donna Frye.


Date Set For Mayoral Suits


Orange County Superior Court Judge Michael Brenner ruled in two lawsuits that say the San Diego County registrar of voters wrongfully disqualified ballots on which voters wrote Frye's name but failed to darken the adjoining optical-scan bubble.

Brenner also ordered the registrar to produce the disputed ballots. Attorneys for Frye supporters say a tally showed 5,547 Frye ballots with empty bubbles -- enough to overcome Murphy's 2,108 margin of victory in the Nov. 2 election which saw about 460,000 votes cast...

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/politics/4123801/detail.html

[MeDeMax]

1. the voter's intent is clear, in my view...

this goes to a fundamental question about voting, is the purpose of the voting process to ascertain the voter's intent or enforce rules.

In writing her name the voters have made it quite clear who their choice was, the bubble is merely a technicality.

I feel the votes for Frye should be counted.

[SoCalDem]

2. Of course they should..

Why on earth would people WRITE HER NAME in, if they did NOT want to vote for her..

What's next? Blue ink=ok...Black ink=not ok??

If the ballots were UNMARKED in any way, I could see the discrepancy, but it's pretty OBVIOUS when they go to the trouble of actually writing the name..


Reminds me of the Gore "disqualified" ballots with Gore check box filled in, AND "Gore" written on the ballot...

This is why the most important atate/local offices, are the ones dealing with voting and the interpretation of those votes.

People who get to design the ballots and set the parameters, are very important people..

Theresa LaPore "won" *² the 2000 election. Her butterfly ballot was all that was needed. It provided the ticket to the SCOTUS. Without that ballot, Gore's West Palm Beach votes would have been more than enough, combined with the popular vote, to shut down the *² loonies.

[Liberty Belle]

3. What makes this even more outrageous is some voters wrote Mayor Murphy's

name and didn't fill in bubbles, so the Registrar let them all be colored in! There's no way to go back now and know how many ballots that was done with, but she has admitted that this was done.