26 April 2016
Election administration blunders in Montana and Maryland
School District 5 mail ballot package has inconsistent ballot marking instructions. A sharp-eyed reader alerted me to the situation, which is embarrassing to the school district, but not a reason to cancel the election.
The package contains two ballots, one for two three-year terms, the other for one two-year term, and a one-third page set of instructions for marking and mailing the ballots. The mailing instructions tell voters to blacken the oval:
Those are the instructions for marking a ballot that will be counted with a machine. But the school board election ballots will be counted by hand and do not contain ovals.
The on-ballot instructions tell voters to mark the box with an X, but do not forbid marking their choice by placing a check mark in the box or by blackening the box:
Absent the presence of a mark explicitly forbidden by law, any mark that clearly reveals the voter’s choice will be valid.
Not all Flathead Memo readers live in SD-5. I therefore scanned my ballots and the mailing instructions, did a few things to convert the ballots to sample ballots, and placed them in a PDF for downloading.
SD-5 won’t make this mistake next year. Still, it would be best for all elections in Montana to be administered by a professional, nonpartisan, state election service.
A portion of Maryland voters who requested absentee ballots in order to participate in this year’s elections erroneously received written instructions to use a No. 2 pencil when filling them out, despite the fact that the state’s system for reading the forms performs best when they are filled out in black pen.
However, voters who used pencil have “no need to worry,” said Nikki Charlson, the Maryland State Board of Elections’ deputy administrator. The error will not leave ballots filled out in pencil uncounted, she said, though it could require officials to replicate forms in pen for processing.
Maryland would also benefit from a professional, nonpartisan, state election service.