From Mitch:
The town of Scotia held an election on August 30th where all of 151 ballots were cast.
One contest was to select 5 directors of a new Community Service District.
Interestingly, one voter chose three and then wrote those three in as write-ins. This constituted an overvote, invalidating their votes in the contest. And wouldn’t you know it, that changed the results.
Details and links to the ballots and independent count results are at
http://democracycounts.blogspot.com/2011/09/scotia-august-2011-results.html
Due to the small number of ballots, we redacted the handwriting of write-ins, replacing it with generated text so you can see the names that were written-in.
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5 comments
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September 2, 2011 at 4:58 pm
tra
Interestingly, one voter chose three and then wrote those three in as write-ins. This constituted an overvote, invalidating their votes in the contest. And wouldn’t you know it, that changed the results.
So much for “voter intent.”
September 2, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Mitch
tra,
It’s an interesting point, and I’m not 100% sure how I feel about it or even what would happen if it were taken to court. (I have no affiliation with the elections office, btw.)
The thing is, the more you can have codified rules about what constitutes an acceptable or an unacceptable vote, the less room there is for election officials to skew things in favor of people they might prefer. And a rule that you can only vote for five choices is about as simple a rule as can be made.
If the situation were the same except the person had only filled in five boxes, I’m sure the candidate would have got their vote.
September 3, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Eric Kirk
Sorry about the erroneous title.
September 5, 2011 at 8:30 am
Anonymous
Happy Labor Day, Eric,
Our sons played one another last week at the Jamboree/Tourney – Asher is a heck of a player. I helped coach a few years ago on Joanie Gallegos’s team, and had Z… on my team.
If it wasnt such a busy day, I wouldve come over and said hello – hopefully you guys are in the Eureka league this year and I will get that chance.
I wouldve preferred just having a jamboree and not a tourney, and a tie as opposed to a coin toss would have been fine in my book.
Stop by City Hall in Eureka when you are in town and can do the cambodian place for lunch.
Enjoy your day,
Paul Rodrigues
September 5, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Eric Kirk
Paul – that was quite a game, wasn’t it? Your kids are great! I look forward to playing them again in October.
And Z.. is devastating!
Did your son’s team make it to play the D3 team? Doesn’t seem fair to have the D3 team rested while the winning rec team has played three games to get there. What would be fun is an “all star” rec team against the D3 team at the end of the season.