Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Double-bubble ballots in LA

This has to be the dumbest idea in a while:

"The ballots given to [LA non-partisan] voters required them to fill in a bubble specifying which primary they were voting in."

So apparently, there were two entries to be made by independent voters (I surmise, not having seen the actual ballot):
1. Which party's primary are you voting for? (Democrat or American Independent)
2. Which candidate do you support? (list)

A vote for Clinton or Obama would not be counted in the AI primary; and neither would those candidates be counted in the Democratic primary. Then why provide question #1 at all? [I first saw this question at Kaus.] Or just don't provide separate ballots for independent voters - that should not make a difference to the counting machine, right?

Somebody's trying to be too smart-by-half - and it might be costing Senator Obama important votes, given his 56-33 lead over Senator Clinton among independents (link, page 3). Independents number over 784,000 in LA county as per the CBS story - but less than 100,000 voted (or were counted?) as per LA County. [Again, link from Kaus.] Of course, unlikely that all 784000 cast a vote, but still... In principle, it is a dumb idea.

(The parent of the American Independent party opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and welfare programs per Wikipedia, and AI is the more extreme progeny... Yikes.)

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