With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
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Notes -
Bush v. Gore involved over 5.8 million votes. At least 113,820 of those marked multiple candidates and thus could not be counted. That suggests a 1.95% baseline.
Here MIT corroborates the 1% number, but they don’t give their source in turn.
I can’t remember if my voting machine even allowed that sort of error. It definitely said “CHOOSE ONE OR NONE.” next to each office. Did they use checkboxes or radio buttons?
Anyway, I don’t see any reason to invoke the Cathedral. Research is rare (but not verboten) because it’s hard, not because it’s existential. After the “butterfly ballots” it was a reasonably popular topic.
I think your search results were just clouded by news stories about polling error, which is much more important to organizations trying to make their predictions.
Method varied by county, but in 2000 Florida a lot of the recount counties used punch cards. You needed to poke a hole with the stylus on a paper ballot and then they were machine counted. So it was easy to poke multiple holes or not poke all the way through. There were also overvotes where someone would punch "Gore" then write in "Gore" in the write in space.
La Griffe Du Lion had a take on the 2000 Florida ballots back in 2001, http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/elec2000.htm
Oh, no, the insanity of the "hanging chads" was much worse than that.
First, you could poke all the way through and not have the machine count it, because the chad happened to still be attached by one or two corners and could thus fold out of the way of your punch but then fold back into place to prevent the scanner from seeing a hole. In the Palm Beach County recounts they had to decide on rules about how a "Tri Chad" with only one separated corner would still count as a vote but a "Pregnant Chad" pushed out but still attached at four corners would not count.
Second, in theory you could not poke through a chad but still have it get counted, because the whole process of the recounts was that you got a bunch of partisans on all sides to manhandle a bunch of paper designed to be easily torn. You think it's bad when a printed paper ballot isn't immediately read perfectly by the scanner/tallier? Imagine if each time someone tried to scan it it got more smudged than the last...
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Right, and then a big chunk of election law was passed to make this less likely. Did it actually yield an improvement? The next few elections didn’t have any similar complaints.
People are already sowing rumors about the touch-screen-and-printer devices popular in the last few years. I didn’t have any trouble with mine; obviously, that doesn’t rule it out.
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