ATTENTION--Election commissioners & poll workers! Write-in voting

[southerncrone]

What is the process for a write-in vote at your precinct?

Is it a piece of paper on which a vote is physically written?
Would this not create a paper trail & by-pass the STEAL-AN-ELECTION voting machines?

Just wonderin' if this could be a way to elect a Democrat. :shrug:

[eyesroll]

1. In most of WI, we have paper ballots and optical scanners.

To vote, you connect the arrows next to the candidates of your choice. It's pretty simple, and there's no weirdly aligned butterfly ballots or anything like that.

To write in, you write your candidate's name on the blank line provided for that purpose under each race, and connect the arrows next to it.

You then feed it into the scanner -- results are tallied electronically; write-ins obviously will be tallied by hand (although a count of the total write-ins for each race is available electronically as well).

Since we already have a paper trail, this would not bypass anything.

[midnight]

2. HI eyesroll. I'm not sure if I have concluded from your answer to

the original post correctly or not. But are you indicating that there is nothing at this point to protect our vote reguardless if a paper ballot is used or not, because it is tallied on a computer?

[eyesroll]

4. I don't think computer tallies are inherently evil.

Yeah, I suppose optical scanners can be programmed to miscount, but people can be bribed to miscount. Or one official at the top can be corrupt enough to misreport a correct count.

And there is the paper that's automatically hand-counted if the election is very close, or if anything seems off/inconsistent (I know there was a hand count in one precinct because the three wards voting there had identical vote totals -- let's say it recorded 300 people, 180 voting "yea" and 120 voting "nay" in a referendum, in each ward, it eventually came out that either the machines or the human, don't remember which, added up all three wards then averaged the totals, instead of reporting them individually as required. Still, the total number of "yea" and "nay" votes was correct, so the election results at a macro level were fine).

What I'm saying is, writing in a candidate here will not likely change the result significantly. The votes generally do get counted here -- Wisconsin went blue in 2000 and 2004, very very close both times.

I did election protection in 2006...by far the bigger problems were human incompetence, overworked elderly poll workers, and confusion over just who was allowed to vote (felons not on probation or parole). Voter intimidation, and long lines may have been a problem in some precincts as well. The polling place I observed had a lot of problems with overvoting -- people voting twice where they can only vote once -- and that's 100% voter error. The machine automatically spits the ballot back out, and the chief inspector looks at the error message and issues a new ballot to the person who overvoted (or otherwise botched their ballot). So in a way, that's a good thing about electronic tallies -- the machines automatically catch some problems.

In Wisconsin, at least, focusing on HAND COUNT NOW! ELECTRONIC EVIL! THEFT THEFT THEFT! is probably counter-productive. Yes, watch out for fraud...but the much bigger issue is plain old incompetence.

[EST]

3. Ours is similar in rural southern Illinois,

except it's a fill-in-the-balloon, test scoring type ballot. There's a write in blank line and a corresponding balloon to mark that as your selection. Ballots are then scanned on ESS scanners, counted and dropped into transparent locked boxes.

I've never done a write in, so I'm not sure how it's read.

[Freddie Stubbs]

5. In my home state of PA write-in votes arent' counted for candidates whose names appear on the ballot

[MaineDem]

6. In Maine we all use paper ballots

A write-in candidate is exactly that. A voter physically writes in the name and hometown of a candidate. If it's not in the proper order or the town isn't listed it can't count.

Instructions are posted at each polling location.