How to spoil your ballot
May. 6th, 2019 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThere's a widely misreported -- or at least misleadingly reported -- high-profile news story about last week's UK elections, in which a Tory ended up winning by a single vote... that consisted of a ballot that was not traditionally marked. I've spent a fair amount of time explaining to a fair few people over the past few days that the Returning Officer in this instance made exactly the correct decision, so here's the overview, in a nice neat central location. For context, a lot of my misspent youth involved hanging out at counts until 3 in the morning as a party-political observer, where my principal role was to ensure that no votes went into the wrong pile, and as such that any ambiguous votes were set aside for further discussion.
So. Broadly, in the UK, ballots are spoiled if (1) the caster is uniquely identifiable from the ballot paper alone (e.g. in Cambridge there's this one guy who always writes the same THE MONARCHY IS RACIST essay on his ballot paper, which wouldn't *necessarily* be enough to spoil his ballot *except* that he *also* has that same essay up in posters in his front window) (but signing the ballot paper, or writing your name on it, also count), or (2) there is no clear mark next to a single candidate.
In general, the way this works is that you do your absolute best to count the vote if there is any indication at all that a single candidate was marked out or preferred, in order to avoid the failure mode where you end up *not* counting votes because you don't like them.
So, for example, if someone draws a frowny face next to every candidate but one -- the candidate without a frowny face gets the vote. If you fill out your ballot paper as if you're voting under STV then the person who you wrote "1" next to (provided you only wrote one 1) gets your vote. If you underline one name only on your ballot paper, that candidate gets your vote -- and so on.
This is all extremely well established in precedent; for what it's worth every time there is A Major Election I tend to write up a post explaining all of this stuff. In general, there's a few spoils per ballot box, but most of them are ballot papers that are simply left blank; in simple cases (like somebody marking their ballot paper with a tick rather than a cross next to a single candidate) then if all the party-political observers agree unanimously the teller will just place the ballot paper in the obviously appropriate pile; if it gets much more complex than that the Returning Officer gets involved to make a final determination based on precedent and case law, though the amount anyone's willing to argue about it often depends on how close the vote is (because a lot of counts start at ~11pm, once the ballot boxes have had time to make it to wherever the count is being held, and then you just keep going until it's all over -- which, if there are recounts involved, can take A Very Long Time).
In this instance, if nothing else had been written on the paper, an arrow pointing at a candidate's name would be interpreted like a tick next to that candidate's name -- "this one". It's true that in this instance the intent of the scrawled "Brexit" is unclear, but given that the aim is to count as many votes as reasonably possible, and given that the arrow wasn't labelled e.g. "anyone but him" (at which point the ballot *would* be considered to not contain any statement of clear preference), I think the right call was made here.
If it wasn't what the voter intended then that's a pity, and hopefully having seen the national attention a bunch of people will do more research into how to effectively spoil ballots -- because the decision made is absolutely what would reasonably be expected by someone who had looked up how this one goes, and consistency in interpretation across electoral areas and through time is really important.
PS EU national resident in the UK? British citizen who moved abroad less that 15 years ago? REGISTER TO VOTE IN THE EUROS. You've got until tomorrow.
So. Broadly, in the UK, ballots are spoiled if (1) the caster is uniquely identifiable from the ballot paper alone (e.g. in Cambridge there's this one guy who always writes the same THE MONARCHY IS RACIST essay on his ballot paper, which wouldn't *necessarily* be enough to spoil his ballot *except* that he *also* has that same essay up in posters in his front window) (but signing the ballot paper, or writing your name on it, also count), or (2) there is no clear mark next to a single candidate.
In general, the way this works is that you do your absolute best to count the vote if there is any indication at all that a single candidate was marked out or preferred, in order to avoid the failure mode where you end up *not* counting votes because you don't like them.
So, for example, if someone draws a frowny face next to every candidate but one -- the candidate without a frowny face gets the vote. If you fill out your ballot paper as if you're voting under STV then the person who you wrote "1" next to (provided you only wrote one 1) gets your vote. If you underline one name only on your ballot paper, that candidate gets your vote -- and so on.
This is all extremely well established in precedent; for what it's worth every time there is A Major Election I tend to write up a post explaining all of this stuff. In general, there's a few spoils per ballot box, but most of them are ballot papers that are simply left blank; in simple cases (like somebody marking their ballot paper with a tick rather than a cross next to a single candidate) then if all the party-political observers agree unanimously the teller will just place the ballot paper in the obviously appropriate pile; if it gets much more complex than that the Returning Officer gets involved to make a final determination based on precedent and case law, though the amount anyone's willing to argue about it often depends on how close the vote is (because a lot of counts start at ~11pm, once the ballot boxes have had time to make it to wherever the count is being held, and then you just keep going until it's all over -- which, if there are recounts involved, can take A Very Long Time).
In this instance, if nothing else had been written on the paper, an arrow pointing at a candidate's name would be interpreted like a tick next to that candidate's name -- "this one". It's true that in this instance the intent of the scrawled "Brexit" is unclear, but given that the aim is to count as many votes as reasonably possible, and given that the arrow wasn't labelled e.g. "anyone but him" (at which point the ballot *would* be considered to not contain any statement of clear preference), I think the right call was made here.
If it wasn't what the voter intended then that's a pity, and hopefully having seen the national attention a bunch of people will do more research into how to effectively spoil ballots -- because the decision made is absolutely what would reasonably be expected by someone who had looked up how this one goes, and consistency in interpretation across electoral areas and through time is really important.
PS EU national resident in the UK? British citizen who moved abroad less that 15 years ago? REGISTER TO VOTE IN THE EUROS. You've got until tomorrow.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-08 04:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-08 09:50 am (UTC)So.
The way this one works is, in the count hall, people present include:
Cambridge, which is where I've done this, has 14 electoral wards. During counts, each ward typically has one table with two tellers at it, processing one ballot box at a time. You will also at each such table have 2-4 party-political observers, who may or may not be the candidate, and if they're not the candidates you'll probably have a candidate pacing as well. (Not all wards get counted at the same time, depending on how long it takes to get all the ballot boxes in from polling stations and verified). Floating around the room you'll also have the party rep, politically neutral support staff, and the Returning Officer and their floating team.
When a teller picks up a ballot paper, unfolds it, and sorts it into the appropriate pile, they do so in such a way that every single party political observer can clearly see the mark made on the ballot. If they pick up two sheets at once by accident and don't notice, an observer will sing out and require that they be separated. If there's any ambiguity at all about the mark on the paper, it will in the first instance be noted by both the tellers and the party-political observers and set to one side to be considered in more detail Later (at this point, that's around 5 people who've seen it already).
Once the first pass has been made through the ballot boxes, unambiguous votes are bundled up (generally into stacks of 50). At this stage any ambiguous votes will get discussed in the first instance by the tellers and party-political observers: if it's simply the case that the ballot was marked with a single tick rather than a single cross, or no marks at all were made on the ballot paper, there's no need to involve anyone more senior, unless someone is being a right arse (because at this point all they're achieving is delaying proceedings to no useful purpose, when it's already gone midnight and many of the people in the room have been up since 5am).
If it's even a wee bit more complicated, party-political observers will call their party representatives over. If party representatives in consultation with their candidates aren't willing to go "yeah, that's a clear spoil with no clear preference marked" (unanimously -- and at this point that's another 4-10 people who've seen the ballot, though it's still the case that only the tellers are allowed to touch the paper), you get the Returning Officer involved to make a final determination, which can take Some Time. During this process, floating observers from the Electoral Commission might have swung by, and if it's a particularly entertaining spoil party-political observers are likely to have called over their colleagues having a lull in a different ward to have a laugh. (Again, it's gone midnight, a lot of us have been up and largely on our feet since 5am, we're going to be keeping going for another couple of hours and then after that we're all going to pile into someone's living room for the afterparty.)
So: no, it's not that someone besides the voting supervisors will read the essay -- it's just that the voting supervisors consist of a wide array of people, to the point that an essay on a ballot paper is likely to be read or at least skimmed by getting on for 20 people (including candidates, party representatives, and politically neutral observers) even if it's not sufficiently amusing that others get called over Just To Have A Look. Basically the only people in the hall who don't have the option of having a gander are the journalists.
tl;dr the electoral process in the UK has a really kind of impressive amount of oversight at all levels and I feel very strongly about it. <3 This summary's not necessarily entirely accurate, not least because it has actually been about a decade since I was active in the process, but I think it gives the flavour!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-09 03:00 am (UTC)Lords, I'm not even sure the candidates would be allowed in the same building as the count, honestly. (Okay, from something I found, maybe they sometimes are -- but they have to stay behind the line with any other "general public"!)
Definitely a lot more involved than what I'd be used to. Okay, I gotta go search out our stuff... It's city-by-city here, at least. (Which means that someone trying to mess with the ballot machines would... probably have issues.)
55% optical scanners (with hand-counting of anything the machine barfs on), 45% hand-count. Hand-counts are generally 4-person teams, a moderator, and a clerk (hopefully!). Unclear ballots get voted on by the teams after the moderator explains the unclarity...
Anyway, according to http://www.wheresthepaper.org/Tobi_PaperBallotElecAdminBasics_July19_07.pdf
Must run. Computer swearing it's running out of room. -_-
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-08 09:45 pm (UTC)The party-political observers also do "tallying". Votes from more than one ballot box are combined into the result from one ward. If you want to know how people voted at a higher geographic resolution than per-ward, the only thing you can do is watch as the votes are tipped out of each ballot box and the initial count just to make sure there's the correct number of ballot papers is made, marking off on a "tally sheet" the votes cast for each party.
Another check on the correctness is these totals. If 26 Labour votes end up in a bundle of nominally 25, the total once all the bundles are made up will be one vote short. Hence a hypothetic malicious teller would have to also be making a like number of short bundles with 24 votes in them.