The Independent View: NYS to Reform Vote Counting Issue

Thanks to Ballot Access News and Nancy Hanks for this post.

Will watching the streaming of a New York State Board of Elections meeting I realized there was a problem with how the board was going to program their new optical scanning machines when counting votes. I made my Executive Committee members' of the New York City Independence Party Organizations aware of the problem. Some of the other minor parties started a court case and allowed the Independence Party to be part of the case.

On September 8, the New York State Board of Elections settled the lawsuit that had been brought by the Conservative Party, the Working Families Party, and the Taxpayers Party, on the subject of how to count votes when a voter erroneously casts two votes (one vote under each party label) for a single candidate. The parties had sued the Board last year, because the state was automatically giving that vote only to the party closer to the top of the ballot in upstate and on the left in New York City, due to ballot formats. In New York, the parties are listed on the ballot in order of how many votes they received for Governor, so the Democratic and Republican Parties are always closer to the top or the left of the ballot than all other parties. Therefore, the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, would get the vote, and the minor party would not.

In May 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff had refused the Board’s request to dismiss this case. That was a signal that the judge felt the case had significant merit, although he hadn’t yet made a final ruling. So, the state decided to stop defending the old policy, and agreed to a fairer system.

The Board of Elections will cause the optical scan voting machines to alert voters when they have double-voted. The machine will display a message that says, “You filled in more than one oval for a candidate in at least one contest. While your candidate preference is clear, it is not clear which party you prefer.” The machine will then show which office is affected, and ask the voter to vote again. The message will also tell the voter that if the voter doesn’t re-do the ballot, the vote will be counted for the party listed first. The voter then will have the choice to accept the vote or get a new ballot. Also, the polling places will have signs near each voting booth that say in big print, “DO NOT VOTE MORE THAN ONCE FOR THE SAME CANDIDATE.”.