The state Division of Elections has just released its required report that looks at over-votes and under-votes from the 2014 race. It's a report that looks at how many voters cast ballots that weren't counted in the governor's race.
Over-votes are when a ballot wasn't counted because more than one candidate was chosen. Under-vote is when the ballot left the spot for governor blank or the machine did not record any choice.
Here's the main things the new report shows:
A total of 82,402 voters cast ballots, but for a multitude of reasons they did not cast a valid vote for governor. That is about 1.36% of all ballots cast.
Scott defeated Crist by 64,145 votes.
But a closer look at these numbers show that it is unlikely that these ballots would have changed the outcome.
For example, 14,362 voters did not have their votes counted for governor because they had an invalid write-in vote. Think someone writing say Mickey Mouse or Jeb Bush in the write-in space as one of the reasons these weren't counted.
Another 4,751 votes rejected were provisional ballots.
The report doesn't exactly say why these ballots were rejected. So it could have been because of over-votes or under-votes, but it also could mean that the voter for whatever reason wasn't qualified to vote. The law regarding provisional ballots is very strict. Someone can have their provisional ballot rejected for just voting in the wrong precinct.
But the report hints there was a much more clear reason why Scott pulled it off. And that's this time around voters were much more sure about who they wanted for governor.
When comparing the 2014 election to the 2010 election the numbers suggest that the Scott campaign goal to provide voters a deep contrast between the incumbent and Crist, and reinforced by tens of millions of negative campaign ads, was in fact truly successful.
That's because the percentage of under-votes fell between 2010 and 2014. In 2010 the amount of ballots left blank was 1.49% versus .93%% this time around.
So, 81,250 voters skipped the governor's race for whatever reason in the 2010 election. That number fell to 56,037 in 2014.
That's even more notable when you consider that the number of people who voted in the race overall went from 5.35 million to 5.95 million. So the electorate grew, but the number of people turned off by the governor's race still dropped.
One last takeaway from the report is that the push to get more people to use absentee ballots has a downside. While the amount of under-votes declined, the percentage of people who voted for more than one candidate increased. It went from .07% in 2010 to .20% in 2014.
Of the 12k over-votes more than 7,000 showed up on absentee ballots.
That's not a complete surprise since a voter doesn't get a chance to re-do their ballot if they vote absentee. If a voter over-votes while using an optical scan machine at a polling place, the voter has a chance to re-do the ballot. In fact, the state's own report gives a technical explanation that states that the percentage of over-votes may be underrepresented.
Still despite all of that the Department of State concludes it found no evidence that ballot design or ballot instructions contributed to any voter confusion during the 2014 election.
Guess that is something the Scott campaign can agree with.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us 
2 comments:
That story has a misleading headline. When a voter leaves an office blank, the voter hasn't voted for that office. So there is no vote to "count" or "not to count."
Yes and No. In NY, if the optical scanner determines an under or over vote, it notifies the voter. Over-votes returns the ballot voided and the voter gets a new ballot. For under-votes, the voter is given the choice to get a new ballot or select they intentional did not make a selection.
If FL does not offer this type of options, then I could understand that they could count it as no vote.
And absentee ballots would not give a voter any chance to correct a mistake.
Post a Comment