Sent from a foot soldier;

So I voted on Tuesday. I normally tell all my friends to write me in. Aside from that I had a couple of candidates that I would have liked to write in myself. Low and behold they DON’T ALLOW THAT here. I asked the lady and she told me it’s not allowed and that they don’t have any ballots that allow write-ins. I even took a picture of the warning in the voting booth. Has it always been that way? Is it this way EVERYWHERE in SD? Either way this really bugs me. This abridges my right to vote for the officials that I want to vote for. All I got was a “prepackaged” version of what the powers that be want me to have and I wasn’t thrilled with most of the choices.

Anyone know why this is?

 

10 Thoughts on “Why can’t we ‘write’ in on ballots in SD?

  1. It’s been that way for the 3+ decades (ugh) I’ve been voting.

  2. OleSlewFoot on November 10, 2012 at 2:37 pm said:

    5 states do not allow write-ins. There are 35 states that do have a process where you sign an affidavit and pay a filing fee a month before the election. Only write-in names posts at the polls are allowed in most states.

    The advent of scanners and touch screen to speed up the process and make it “accurate?” seem to be part of the reason states don’t like it even if they do allow it. Interesting articles on the net about this, but nothing of the “why” in SD.

    A student at USD agree with you — http://tinyurl.com/bxapyxu

  3. I don’t know if this is true, but a old friend (meaning much older than me) says it was done to keep the Prohibitionist Party from running candidates here decades ago. Like I said I don’t know if its true, but sounds like something that could happen.

  4. When a ballot has writing on it other than the oval filled in, it can’t be counted properly by the machine. A person has to look at it and decide what to do. The process we use is the Resolution Board, which are equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats who then figure out why the ballot hasn’t been counted and what to do with it.

    First, this has to be done manually, and the counting for that precinct has to stop while the damaged/mismarked/wrote upon ballots are dealt with and then recounted. This slows the counting process down considerably. Do you want to wait until morning for election results?

    Second, you are relying on humans to interpret your write in. That is a lot of trust. SD codified law is pretty particular about how the Resolution board handles damaged or mis marked ballots. Write ins on the ballot is a whole new ballgame.

    Wanting write ins on the ballot is a way of expressing an opinion which is not adequately represented on the ballot. I completely get that. While opinions can be in infinite variety, the choices of what to actually do are necessarily limited or nothing gets decided.

  5. grudznick on November 11, 2012 at 12:30 am said:

    They may not let you write in a candidate but I wrote Mr. H’s name softly right by my YES vote on 16 to nullify his YES vote on 15 to raise my food taxes just so he could get a raise. The lady said that was OK the machine would read it fine.

  6. As to the “waiting” issue. Who CARES. What’s the hurry. No on elected will be sworn in for months yet anyhow. Same in regard to IMs and RLs. they won’t be implenented before January in most cases anyhow.

    Now to the “machine” issue. You know, they make these things called high-speed scanners now-a-days that use this stuff called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Actually – it’s been around for several decades now – even your little local bank has access to this stuff, and it is AMAZING at how good it is at recognizing some really awful scrawly handwriting on checks and stuff and translating it into something that can populate a field in a database – ACCURATELY. In the 100’s of documents per minute range.

    Seriously – it is the 21st century. I promise you – it really is.

  7. As someone who knows a bit about IT and was on the resolutions board having to decide voter intent, OCR will not work unless the ballot is completely redesigned. An option previously used in other states is an mark made with a line to write in beside it. The machines will reject all ballots marked out of place.

    So under each race, a mark would need to be place next to the blank line or box so the machine would spit it out for manual count. Reading the messages voters left on their ballots is hard enough much less have a machine figure it out.

  8. We certainly can’t be redesigning ballots – can we? It might change the way SD has always been.

  9. What legitimate purpose would a write-in ballot serve?

    If someone wants to run for office there is a process to get their name on the ballot. If they are too lazy, can’t get enough signatures, or lack interest enough to follow that process then why should we afford them the right to have their name voted on a ballot?

    Also, keep in mind many write in candidates aren’t even real (current day) people. There was a state in this latest election where a few thousand voters wrote in “Darwin” to protest a candidate who was an evolution denier. In other cases we have had people write in the names of fictional characters (Al Bundy, Peter Griffin, Napoleon Dynamite et al) or celebrities who don’t even live in the area (Martin Sheen, Bill Pulman, etc.) Thus in many cases, the write-in choice isn’t even a valid person who could be elected.

    Then you have the issue of if the person even wants to be elected in the first place. Let’s say you have a small town of 300 people and everyone thinks “Bill Johnson” would make a fantastic mayor, but Bill doesn’t want to run because he is battling liver cancer and knows he will be unable to fulfill his duties. Bill doesn’t advertise his cancer because it isn’t anyone’s business, and in the end the only person who registered to run as mayor was “Mike Smith” who just so happens to be the town drunk who has spent more time in the county jail than some of the employees who work there. So the residents decide they don’t want Smith as Mayor so a bunch of them write in “Bill Johnson”. So “Bill Johnson” wins the vote but not only does Bill not want the job, but it turns out there is a William “Bill” Johnson Sr. and a William “Bill” Johnson Jr. and another Bill Johnson who just moved to town two weeks ago and now there is no way to legally know the intent of every voter. Talk about a cluster.

    95% of the time, write-in candidates are nothing more than a way to protest who is on the ballot. Frankly, there are many ways to do that, and thus I don’t see the purpose. The only thing it would do is slow down the process and you would end up with a list of silly names and fictional characters who just so happen to earn some votes because someone thinks they are clever.

    If someone wants to run, let them file paperwork to do so instead of thinking voters should have the right to put someone in a position which they may not even want. I just don’t see an example of where a write-in candidate solves a legitimate problem with the process.

  10. Sometimes it’s not as clear-cut as “tell them to file the paperwork”. I’ll give you my example – I wanted Ron Paul as the GOP presidential candidate. Instead I got someone with really pouffy hair who talks a slick game but doesn’t represent what I want in a conservative candidate. I would LOVE to have written in Rep. Ron Paul instead. But that wasn’t an option. I’m sure it takes some kind of work to read the ballots, that’s called life. The people who read these things are civil servants, that’s the job that county auditors and employees of the Sec of State are paid to do; if they can’t handle that they should do something else to do for a living.

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