Amendment to the Election Commissioner Rule 5.1

[Dreadton]

Commissioners,
I am proposing we change the following rule from:

1. If a voter does not vote Yes or No to a question to re-open nominations for a given office, their vote for that office will not be counted.

To:

1. If a voter does not vote Yes or No, without embellishment or alteration, to a question to re-open nominations for a given office, their vote for that office will not be counted.

During the Judicial Elections, a citizen answered the RON Question with "Yes, forever" With a plain text reading of the rule, this vote would be invalid. The rule states that the question must be answered with Yes or No. It does not permit there to be alterations to the answer. Much the same way "Si" "Ya" or any other affirmative would not be a valid response under this rule. I believe that this was the intent of the rule.

Alternatively, the Election Commission has held here that when the intent of the voter is clear, they have cast a valid ballot. I believe this ruling and the wording of the rule has created an ambiguity that needs to be resolved.

During the election challenge period, I discussed this with the Election Supervisors and agreed with them that we should err on the side of the voter in counting the disputed ballot, but the ambiguity should be discussed after the election. I propose the above rule change in order to resolve this issue and to keep with what I think the intent of the rule is.

 

[Fregerson]

I feel like it isn't just the RON that needs to be changed, but we need to standardise on how to deal with embellishment or alteration throughout the entire vote. I mean, a good example would probably be a voter writing Madjack instead of St. George on the voting slip. Does that count? If we don't lay that out in stone, then when such a situation shows up, we will have to go back to square 1 to decide whether such a thing is allowed.

 

[Sil Dorsett]

The disadvantage of text is that it's difficult to convey emotions and the feelings in your head. Sarcasm is one of those things. If someone putting "Yes, forever" on the ballot is being sarcastic and actually intends "No," then we can't determine that. It's more like if someone has a punch-hole ballot and the Yes option is punched and then they write "forever" on the paper after it. The machine reading the ballots will just read that as a Yes. It won't care about the "forever" piece of it. That's the way I'd go with it, so I think the no embellishments rule is unnecessary in this case.

 

[Dreadton]

If no to the rule, I still would like it to be clear to the public at large how we will be interpreting this issue in future elections.