On Oct 4, 2004, at 10:58 PM, Charlie Strauss wrote:
> has anyone, perhaps doug jones investigated this one?
Top-of the ballot undervotes are really suspicious, but the ones
reported in the cited article,
> http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/04/Tampabay/Voting_mystery_stirs_.shtml
are at the bottom of the ticket. I usually undervote on offices
where I've never heard of any of the candidates. I routinely
undervote on judicial retention races, for example, so that anyone
who has strong feelings about the judge in question will be given
weight.
That said, differences between the undervote rates for comparable
offices at the bottom of the ballot from one county to the next
could be explained several ways:
1) A hot local race. The race for sheriff is usually no contest,
the incumbent versus someone nobody's heard of. Good reason to
undervote. This year, though, it's a hotly contested open seat.
2) Something fishy in the user interface design of the voting system
that encourages voters to abandon their ballot early. While I
get annoyed with voting interfaces that force me to read all the
candidate names in all the races, even though I just want to vote
and run, I'd also not want the system to make it too easy to vote
and run. This is a human factors problem, in Ben Bederson's
bailywick.
3) A dishonest voting system that selectively tosses out votes for
some candidate. I find this unlikely, but I can't rule it out
entirely.
Doug Jones
jones@cs.uiowa.edu
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Received on Mon Nov 1 15:28:42 2004
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