Jun 12 2009
Illinois Undervote Law
In 2007, the State of Illinois passed legislation that will require notification to voters when they do not cast a vote for any one or more of the state constitutional officers (Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Comptroller, Treasurer). I blogged about this in November 2007.
This year, the Illinois Association of County Clerks and Recorders put the elimination of this provision high on their legislative priorities. I helped craft a one page summary of arguments for removing this provision. Unfortunately, the legislative leadership in Springfield doesn’t see this provision as a problem.
I am now putting together the information necessary to demonstrate that this provision violates U.S. law, the Illinois Constitution, and Illinois law. One piece of that information is the law regarding notification of undervotes in each of the other 49 states. This summary demonstrates that the legal requirement to notify voters of an undervoted optical scan ballot exists in only one other state, New York. Like Illinois, New York has yet to conduct an election using this undervote provision.
Our right to a secret ballot is fundamental to a democratic process that is open and free from coercion. I’ll continue to post information as it is gathered and we now have a page on the website devoted to this issue.
I thought your one-page summary of arguments against the provision was excellent. Another point to be made is that once voters understand what will happen if they undervote, they may decide to vote in a contest for which they are uninformed — just to avoid the public warning at the scanner.
It sounds to me like the county clerks are fighting against a common-sense provision to warn voters who forgot to vote in a particular contest. What voter could object to being politely warned as long as the voter is allowed to cast the ballot and override the warning?
The opposition of county clerks to the proposal has me wondering why.
Is the opposition due to:
the clerks’ close relationship to the voting machine vendors whose sofware was not designed to warn voters of undervotes?
the clerks’ attempt to avoid extra work?
the clerks’ fear of longer lines at the polls?
Certainly the Champaigne county clerk can not really think it violates the US constitution to alert voters to the fact that they may’ve forgotten to vote in a contest? We’ve seen too many cases where ballot design caused voters not to notice an important contest.
We’ve also seen an eerie similarity in the design specification flaws among all voting systems in the US such as writable log files, voting systems that do not report counts for ballots that are normally stored together, making auditing the accuracy of today’s voting machines very difficult and time-consuming. Just who is designing the specifications for all of today’s voting machines so poorly?
Election officials need to begin consulting with experts to require voting systems that use modern auditability and security features, not trying to cover their mistakes by avoiding common-sense measures used in virtually all other fields.
What voter could object to being politely warned as long as the voter is allowed to cast the ballot and override the warning?
Actually, many voters object. They’ve told me as much. And you can count me among those people.
It’s disappointing that you would assign a motive to the clerks when I linked directly to our list of concerns. This will present clerks with no more work. I estimate that it will increase the amount of time to do testing by a total of 5 to 10 minutes. Our programming time will increase by about 1 minute. As to the vendors, they will be more than happy to charge various clerks for the added expense of programming the election. Premier (formerly Diebold) told the State Board of Elections as much.
As to design flaws in ballots, I would point you to my blog post from August of last year where I write about our implementation of many of the recommendations by the Brennan Center for improved ballot design.
http://blog.champaigncountyclerk.com/2008/08/20/making-better-ballots/
As to auditing, I’d point you to the various posts I’ve written regarding post election redundant recounts.
Disclosure: Our company makes voting systems. I am an officer of the company.
There is a solution to this issue: one that gives voters maximum privacy and one that allows votes to be cast on auditable paper ballots. The solution: Ballot Marking Devices. The idea is simple: a voter prepares the ballot on a computerized system; one that also allows voters with disabilities to vote and one that also allows multiple languages.
Preparation of the ballot does not mean casting the ballot. Preparation means preparing an unambiguous paper ballot that is cast separately from the preparation of the ballot. During the preparation of the ballot, the voter can be warned in private if there is an undervote.
I’m sure there are other solutions as well (a scanner in a voting booth dedicated to detecting voter errors).
The use of the term “unambiguous” is chosen carefully. Many handmarked ballots are ambiguous for a variety of reasons — such as the voter’s circling a name or putting an X in a box that should be blackened. Note that in this case, the warning of an undervote ALSO serves as a warning that the ballot is improperly marked.
[...] regarding voter notification of undervotes on the above noted races, we found that notification would have almost no impact in preventing [...]
[...] first option and are using equipment that notifies them when they cast too many votes. As I noted in an earlier post, only New York has a statutory provision similar to the Illinois provision of notifying voters of [...]
[...] I wrote a few weeks ago about the Illinois under vote law and noted that the only other state to require this by statute was New York. I just received a call today from a Commissioner in one of the New York counties telling me that the New York State Board of Elections has passed an emergency rule rescinding their undervote notification requirement. [...]
[...] then there’s the cost. When I wrote about the undervote issue in June, someone suggested that the concern of the clerks might somehow be tied to a cozy relationship with [...]
This type of “law” for what appears to be benefit of those who count ballots, must be stopped as the ability to “tweak” election results becomes more available and more enticing. Bottom line please do what must be done to overturn. We need accountability at all levels of government. Thanks for your diligence.
Having voted early [being an election judge, it's nice to have that option]; and knowing about that infernal ‘beep’; it still ticked me off! Voting for the person/referendum of your choice, as well as NOT casting a vote for an office/referendum, is a RIGHT.
Our esteemed State Board of Elections seem to be of the mind-set that not voting for an office is a mortal sin; and everyone should know about it. Let’s hope that they come to their senses and rescind this steaming mass of male bovine fecal material immediately.
There is a simple solution if you do not want to hear the beep when you deliberately decide not to vote in a contest:
Mark *all* the choices. I.e. fill out “Yes” and “No” or “Option B” and “Option C” or fill out too many candidates.
That is a much safer option than leaving your choices blank because I have heard stories of having ballots that are left blank later filled out by some insider within an election office for their own preferred candidate, although I suppose the risk of that happening is more so with absentee ballots, depending on procedural safeguards when the ballots are opened.
Ideally, there should be an oval to fill out saying “No Vote” or similar, then you won’t have to worry about the beep.
Since there is no such option today on most ballots (perhaps there is insufficient room on the ballots for that?) and since it is very important to warn most people of undervotes because often it is not deliberate as it is in your case, you really should simple overvote any contest you want to not vote in, as I make a habit of always doing simply to protect my ballot from being illicitly used after I cast it.
forcing voters to go through extra hoops to have the secrecy of their ballot protected is outrageous in my opinion. we should make the process simpler, not more complicated.
as to filling out ballots after the fact I’d be very curious about how that would happen. There is a paper record of the number of undervotes. Of course, that computer tally is what is generally used for determining winners. so filling in the ovals after the fact is not beneficial.
No vote would be a nice option. It exists in NJ. Perhaps in other states too.
It’s hard to look at the undervoted ballots and imagine that many of them are not intentional. I understand issues with butterfly ballots, DREs with two screens for a race, or two races on a screen, or ballots with races in two columns. None of those are issues with Champaign County ballots. I have published each and every undervoted Champaign County ballot from November 2006. I’d be curious as to which ones you believe were unintentional.