Dec 08 2009
DRE and Optical Scan Undervote Comparison
If you read our memorandum in support of our effort to strike down the undervote statute, you’ll see that we argue that the right to vote is a fundamental right. As such, any infringements upon it have to be reviewed under strict scrutiny. One aspect of that is to demonstrate that there is a compelling state interest in the limitation of the right.
When it comes to the undervote statute, the only possible legitimate interest of the state is that the law might prevent unintentional undervotes. I believe our previous research already destroys that argument. But there is yet another argument that I haven’t yet written about.
If in fact the absence of an error message on an undervote resulted in unintentional undervotes, then it stands to reason that the presence of an error message would drive down undervotes. Unfortunately for the propenents of this law, that is definitely not the case.
In Champaign County in November 2006, the overall percentage of undervotes for the statewide constitutional officers was 2.5% using either the M100 alone or in conjunction with the Automark Voter Assistance Terminal.
However, if you take a look at the Automark alone, those ballots had an undervote rate on the statewide constitutional officers of 2.9% Clearly, the presence of the undervote notification on the Automark is not creating any more votes for any of these offices.
Another example is the comparison between Champaign and Kane Counties. Kane County uses all DRE machines, providing undervote notification to each voter. They had a 1% undervote rate for the Presidential election in November 2008. Champaign County on the other hand had a rate of just one half of that (.5%).
There’s no evidence that anything more than a handful of votes will be positively changed with this law. It’s no wonder that no other state in the country has this requirement.
Can someone help me with finding which legislators in each house voted for this bill in 2007?
I am not ver pc litterate.
Thank you.
The undervote provision was in an omnibus election bill SB 662 passed in the 2007 legislative session. The bill is 193 pages long and has numerous provisions, many of which are commendable. It passed the Senate unanimously. It was completely replaced in the House and passed unanimously. The Senate then had to concur with the House changes. There was one No vote.
Leadership from both parties were sponsors. When it came over to the House it was sent to the Executive Committee rather than the Elections committee. So it is pretty clear that the goal was to pass a bunch of noncontroversial (or at least agreed to) election law changes that might get tangled up in procedural problems if placed in separate bills.
The undervote provision was an amendment to existing provisions regarding notification about overvotes. The charitable explanation is that someone saw this as a way to catch inadvertent voter mistakes so that they could be corrected.
The cynical explanation is that someone thought some voters were not robotically completing the ballot after the straight ticket was eliminated, and this would detect defective robots. It is pretty likely that all statewide constitutional offices would have candidates from both parties. To someone who believes that elections are simply between the two major parties, there may be no plausible explanation why someone would vote for governor and not treasurer, other than they didn’t understand how to continue voting “D” or “R” throughout the ballot.