June 06, 2004
A Requiem For The Written-In
More On Why We Won't Learn Some Election Results
At the end of May, we wrote about write-in votes and how our vote-counting systems aren't built for easy or efficient determination of them. In fact, it's apparently the case that there's no way to even -- at the very least -- automatically sort all the ballots containing write-in votes for a given race into a separate pile. At least that's what appears to have been communicated to us
To re-quote John Kauffman of the Multnomah County Elections Division: "Actually, someone would sit at a table with all the ballots for a given precinct and look through all of them to find those containing write-ins."
Since we also recently posted about the election results, this lingering question about write-in votes has of course been on our mind again. Readers will recall that we encouraged write-in votes for two races: James Jahar Perez for Multnomah County District Attorney, and None Of The Above for City Commissioner No. 4.
We don't have anything particularly new to add to the problem of write-in votes, but given Kauffman's above indication of how a county of specific write-ins would have to be conducted, here's what that means: Someone (or someones) would have to methodically go through all 164,635 ballots from all 129 precincts of Multnomah County. By hand.
If one person attempted to do this, working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and if he or she could go through one ballot per minute... it would take 114 days. In other words, a little under four months.
Comments (1)
torridjoe on 07 Jun 2004
Here's something interesting I got from my House delegate, Greg McPherson:
http://www.leg.state.or.us/macpherson/capup6_7_04.htm
Apparently McPherson won BOTH primaries for his seat in the last election; he won on his own Democratic ticket with 99% of the vote, and also won by virtue of write-in in the GOP primary, with 535 votes for 66% of that race. Accordingly, he will be the only name on the ballot--an interesting precursor to the new measure that passed on the 18th. At least he got his solo shot fair and square--he won 165% of the vote!
like the new look,
TJ