Like you got to pick your vote!Google DIEBOLD or VOTE FRAUD.
Minnesota uses no touchscreen electronic voting machines, but rather paper ballots only, along with optical scanners. For the mechanically/visually impaired who would struggle with marking a paper ballot an electronic ballot marker is available as well, but it simply produces a marked paper ballot that gets fed into the scanner. In short there is a paper trail on each and every voter.
All elections here, local or statewide, see mandatory recount of those paper ballots if the election comes in within a half-percent margin. Since we had this statewide race come in this close the optical scanners have been subjected to intense scrutiny from both campaigns in each and every precinct and county, and their accuracy while not absolutely 100% perfect is remarkably good and definitely justifies full confidence in results outside that half-percent margin.
Most of the ballot issues under scrutiny involve either ballots with mistakes/stray marks or intentional screwing around by the voter, for those that voted on site. Any of those voters who screwed their ballot up could have requested starting over with a clean ballot form, and their screwed up ballot would have been destroyed rather than run through the scanners. Where there is an inordinately high percentage of rejected ballots is in the early voting/absentee area, because of various legal requirements in place to insure that nobody is 'double-voting' through that method. Our law states 4 justifiable reasons for rejecting an absentee ballot, apart from the possibility of overvoting in a particular race-
1) Received too late. Ballot must be received before deadline, and the US Postal Service is not 100% reliable, so voting by mail is always a crapshoot in that regard.
2) No voter registration card. It's the voter's responsibility to make sure they're on the rolls of registered voters, and its a mistake to assume registration is still good despite being registered previously. Another crapshoot if you make assumptions about your valid registration. Ballots will invariably be checked against the rolls, and checked to insure you didn't vote on-site as well on election day.
3) Address on envelope must match what's in the rolls. You could be disenfranchised if you've moved but not updated your voter registration accordingly.
4) You must sign the absentee ballot (sig must match voter registration sig in the eyes of election judges) and check one of the menu boxes indicating reason for voting early/absentee. Nobody's going to conduct an in-depth investigation into the validity of the reason presented, but if no menu box is checked the ballot is legally rejected.
Bottom line- nearly 10% of voters voted absentee in this election, many of those ballots weren't counted due to any of the above valid and legal reasons. But a good number, ~1350 or so, were rejected for reasons not legally valid, and that '5th pile' of improperly previously rejected absentee ballots will be counted next week.
Lessons to be learned for voters anywhere- 1) NEVER VOTE ABSENTEE IF YOU CAN VOTE ON SITE. The chances of being disenfranchised due to more stringent rules in play are greater than you may think, any misunderstanding of the form and its requirements can lead to rejection, and nobody will be getting ahold of you to let you know there is a problem with your ballot unless they receive it well ahead of time and your precinct has a policy of attempting to reach such problem absentee/early voters. 2) NEVER ACCEPT A PAPERLESS VOTING SYSTEM. If your state has invested in a system that leaves no clear and secure paper trail for recount purposes you have a responsibility to insure that your state wasted its money on that purchase and reverts back to paper ballots. Insist upon paper ballots and mandatory recounts of close elections if you wish to see your elections get regular scrutiny when they're close. Without that regular scrutiny of a clear paper trail there is no disincentive against software manipulation in purely electronic vote counts.
I really wish he would have won. James would have been fantastic as well.
