Should Franken voters be allowed to vote?

This is one of the ballots that are being disputed in the Minnesota recount, courtesy of Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire. Brad Hynes describes some of the dilemmas awaiting the recount crew;

If a voter fills in the bubble for Coleman and then writes “NO” in capital letters next his name, should we take that as an intended vote for Coleman? Does a smudged thumb print count as a distinguishing mark, like a signature or Social Security number, which should invalidate the ballot? And then there are those excruciating calls: “Even though the voter filled in the bubble next to [Dean] Barkley’s name, a Franken representative said what appear to be eraser marks over Franken’s bubble indicated the voter intended to vote for Franken.”

Ya know, all my life until I moved to this urban wonderland (when I wasn’t voting with absentee ballots), I used the old mechanical machines for voting with which I flicked a series of switches next to the names of the candidates and then pulled one large lever to open the curtain and register my votes. What was wrong with that?

In fact, I remember when I was in grade school we used the county’s machines to vote for our class officers (as a civics lesson to teach us how to use the machines when we reached voting age, some 15 years in the future) and none of my fellow grade-schoolers had a problem voting. I’ll grant you that we had to teach ourselves how to put on condoms without the benefit of the intense school room study that it requires now, but we knew how to vote. But that was back when schools were more interested in making grade-school-aged children good citizens than making us good sexual partners.

Sometimes change isn’t always for the better.

More stupid voters at Minnesota Public Radio (by way of Hot Air). Michelle Malkin calls the Lizard people ballot “the most bizarre of 2008”.

Category: Politics