It is vital to a democracy that people vote. Except we are going to throw these votes away, and you people don’t count because you like someone other than the establishment chose, and if the outcome we have planned doesn’t happen then we have ways to overcome that too.
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I think we are using different “processes or procedures”.
I agree that provisional voting is cumbersome and a burden, and does discourage people from voting. Based on what I’ve heard and read about California’s primary laws, it should also be unnecessary for NPP voters to vote in the Democratic primary.
Counting provisional ballots is also hard. Each ballot has to contain enough information on it that the claim of “yes, this person can vote” can be verified, that they didn’t vote twice, etc, then the ballots have to be anonymized, all before they can be counted. The actual counting is probably as easy as feeding a stack of ballots into a ballot scanner. It’s the verifying the ballot is legit which is the hard part.
If the provisional ballots can affect the outcome then it is absolutely necessary to count them. And they do. It’s just that in the majority of elections, the number of provisional ballots (plus absentee and military ballots, which have the same sort of handling issues) is smaller than the margin of victory. In which case, actually processing the ballots is a lot of work that will not change the outcome.
As an extreme example, if all 397,857 votes for Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary were cast as provisional ballots, you could tell without counting them that in every Congressional district there were fewer provisional ballots than ballots for Donald Trump, and so validating them, anonymizing them, and counting them could not possibly, under the rules of the Indiana Republican primary, keep Trump from taking all the delegates of the state. Under those circumstances, why go through the work?
The Democratic primary, being a proportional system, is different. Looking at New York as an example, in my district (NY-23) there were 5 delegates at stake and 52,459 qualified votes, or 10491.8 votes per delegate. If Sanders were to get between 26230 and 36721 (inclusive) votes, he would get 3 of those delegates. He got 29,980. If he had gotten 6742 more votes, he would have gotten 4 delegates. If he had gotten 3750 fewer votes, he would have gotten 2 delegates. If there were 2000 provisional ballots, then even if they were all for Sanders, they wouldn’t have changed the delegate counts for my district, and (for my district) would not need to be counted. If there were 4000 provisional ballots, then they would have been counted, even though Clinton could not have won an additional delegate (she could potentially lose one).
The complication here of course is the statewide delegates, which are decided by statewide vote totals, and thus aggregate provisional ballot counts. While I can think of protocols to minimize the counting of provisional ballot counts when it won’t make a difference (for instance, after provisional ballot counts for districts that need them are done, iteratively add more provisional ballot counts until the remainder is too few to matter), it may simply be easier to just count them rather than figure out which ones can wait.
I expect that California will do likewise: just count all of them.
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Indeed:
[Source: the amazingly talented Peter Kuper, as printed in his retrospective book, Speechless.]
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Long and interesting story, actually. 99% Invisible had a good episode about that last November.
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It’s so much easier when you know the correct outcome in advance 
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If the number of provisional ballots would not change the delegate count to the point where it would alter the outcome, then no. And by the way, it’s more likely that the majority of the provisional ballots would go to Hillary, not Bernie, due to the makeup of the voters the GOP has attempted to disenfranchise.
Because we don’t vote as a country, but as 50 individual states, each with its own rules. And each political party in each state has its own rules.
We don’t vote for a President, but vote for members of the Electoral College, who actually selects the winner.
It all comes from a mistrust of too much power in the hands of the elite few, and a mistrust of too much power given to the unwashed rabble.
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The pragmatic argument, however, forgets (or willfully ignores) that this isn’t just a process to take a single, isolated-in-time decision: this is politics.
Good numbers matter a great deal in politics. Pundits will pundit over them, statisticians will run statistics over them, strategists will strategize over them. A difference of 1% or 2% here and there will become critical at one point or another. Maybe those 5,000 “lost” ballots are from a union, which means such union will see its bargaining power vs politicians diminished because “you didn’t bring in the votes you guaranteed”. Maybe they are from the Tuvalu immigrant community, who again will lose out on influence. And so on and so forth.
Honestly, the more I learn about US electoral mechanisms, the more I think you guys have absolutely no business exporting your “democracy” anywhere else. We have our disenfranchisement problems in Europe as well but they are nowhere near your scale.
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It doesn’t matter. If it is to mean anything, every part of the process should be above reproach.
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Most of what’s in the OP is simply factually wrong.
To start with, provisional ballots were not invented after the 2000 debacle. Not in California, anyway.
I was a California Poll Clerk for nearly two decades before the 2000 elections, and California has had provisional ballots since I began.
The whole ‘placebo vote’ thing is nonsense: election results are announced before the provisionals are counted IF the number of provisionals are too small to affect the outcome.
…and their count is not included in immediately-reported election totals,
…but they are, nevertheless, investigated and counted (or not, as evidence warrants) and added later to the official tally.
Most of the provisional ballots I helped voters submit were the result of voters who had moved, but failed to re-register in timely fashion at their new address. They sometimes thought they should nevertheless be entitled to vote - either at their old precinct or their new one.
Unfortunately, they’re not.
But they are entitled to cast a provisonal ballot (as is anyone who is denied the right to cast a normal ballot for any reason under standard polling procedure.)
When their ballot is investigated (and it will be!), it may not be counted, if (as is usually the case) they just didn’t re-register within the period the law requires.
But it would be investigated. No ballot is discarded without being checked.
Not here in California, anyway.
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That being said, I should note that it does, indeed, sound as though the folks instructing the OC poll clerks are misinforming them.
n.b.: I’m not currently a poll clerk, and haven’t been since the ‘open primary’ was created, so I’m not totally up on the particulars.
…buuuuuuut I suspect I know how the confusion might have arisen:
In years past (prior to the ‘open primary’) voters only got ballots with the partisan primary candidates of party they were registered with.
NPP voters got ballots containing only non-partisan races (judgeships, propositions, referendums, etc.).
Voters registered as "Independent’ were members of the American Independent Party, and they got ballots with AIP Party candidates.
Inevitably, some new registrants would regIster as “No Party Preference” or “Independent”, and then expect to be allowed to vote in whichever major-primary party they chose.
And so polling clerks have long been advised on the use of provisional ballots to placate confused NPP/Independent voters who wanted a [Democratic|Republican] ballot.
But things have changed since the new “open primaries” took effect recently, and anyone can vote in any party’s primary no matter what party they’re registered with.
Now, the clerks and the people who teach the classes are civic-minded volunteers, many of them retired, and many have been at it since God was young, so they sometimes get a little set in their ways.
And some of them are… well, not dim, but not exactly the brightest candles on the cake.
So, I think they’re entirely incorrect about giving NPP/Indy voters provisional ballots (and if I’m right, then all those provisionals will be counted, because that’s EXACTLY the sort of cock-up provisional ballots were invented to circumvent. That’s WHY we have them.)
But I find my suspected explanation a much more likely explanation than the poll-clerk trainers of Orange County conspiring to rig the primary for Hillary. (-:
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The problem is, until someone gets over 50% of committed (elected) delegates, we literally cannot know whether a single delegate could affect the outcome. The superdelegates who are pledged to Hillary are allowed to change their mind at any time and vote however they like at the DNC.
We can say, at this point, that it’s extremely unlikely that any single delegate’s vote will affect the outcome, but we can’t throw out the vote just because it’s not likely to matter. At that point, we might as well say, “Throw away any ballot that @art_carnage uses to vote, because it’s extremely unlikely that his single vote will be the deciding vote in any given election.”
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Thing is, I never really put much thought into voting until I started looking into the US elections. The system seems rigged against the people and rigged against any third party candidate.
I mean, my country’s system is comparatively simple. I select one of the names on the ballot, the votes are all counted and we have a new parliament. No electoral college, no voter registration, no gerrymandering.
The US system is much more fun to watch (In a cant-look-away sort of way), it just feels like it’s not in the people’s best interest to maintain.
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I was in charge of a precinct polling location in Orange County prior to 2000 and I agree with your take on the provisional ballots. Also, they did count as long as a voter has registered to vote and did vote at least once at the previous address. The easiest way is to go to that precinct and vote. However, if it’s geographically impossible, this is how and when provisional ballots work.
I can also state that when I was trained the people in Santa Ana (OC elections) always encouraged erring on the side of being sure every one who is eligible to vote was not disenfranchised; that is, if someone wants to vote and there is a glitch, give them an provisional ballot and let the election clerk verify eligibility. I found it was the volunteers who most wanted to deny voting rights, not the bureaucrats.
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IIRC none of the Democratic primaries are "winner take all’-- which makes the horserace coverage of the race a little troubling.
The republicans have winner take all contests, but what do you expect of them?
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I’m not talking about “extremely unlikely”. I’m talking about being mathematically impossible, as is obvious from my statement, that you have gone out of your way to misconstrue.
In the US you actually get more of a say as to what those names on the ballot are, I guess.
No, it’s not obvious, in point of fact.
Your earlier comments seem to indicate that you think that if the vote is 55,000 to 40,000, with 5,000 uncounted, that the 5,000 should be uncounted, as they cannot change the “winner.” When it was pointed out that that 5,000 could count for multiple delegates, you say that “If the number of provisional ballots would not change the delegate count to the point where it would alter the outcome, then [the provisional ballots should not be counted].” (emphasis mine)
There are many things you could have said there in place of “would” that would have given a clear meaning of “mathematically impossible.” “Could,” for example (and, for further clarity, add adverbs like “conceivably” to taste).
“Would” involves looking into the future, and saying “Will this change the outcome,” and I admit, for any number provisional ballots in California, the answer is, “Probably not.” “Could,” on the other hand, involves looking into the future and saying, “Can this, even in an extreme edge case, change the outcome,” and, in some bizarre scenarios, yes, a single delegate in California could do that.
Anyway, even if your word choice spoke to the “only count them if impossible,” you’re bringing up the idea that the ballots could change the delegate count, but not “to the point where it would alter the outcome.” This seems to indicate that you think that there is a scenario where this happens, despite the fact that no outcome just in California (and no likely scenario across all of next Tuesday) will put Hillary over the top in elected delegates. Admittedly, doing the math, it is mathematically possible for her to clinch the nomination just on ballots, but it would require her to take >70% of the remaining delegates — I think that’s even less likely than an indictment on the email thing causing a bunch of superdelegates to swing their votes the other way (which is, in turn, less likely than the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup next year).
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All the more reason they should be properly counted. If they’re in such small numbers, it should be quick and easy.
That might make sense mathematically, but logically it is total nonsense. In that case, the votes that took candidate A from 400,001 to 500,000 were also a waste, so why count those? May as well throw them out too. But to be fair, if you throw out 99,999 votes for one candidate, you have to do the same for the other candidate. But wait - now they’re uneven again, so a lot of them don’t count so you have to repeat… Eventually, only the 1st vote would be counted and that one vote would determine the outcome, all the rest would be thrown out. That is mathematically sound, and it would save a lot of work, but that’s not very democratic.
Why not just count them all properly like we’re supposed to? Just because someone is too lazy to do their job?
Coincidentally, throwing one piece of trash on the ground because “it’s so small it wouldn’t make a difference in filling up the trash can” can get you a ticket for littering. Why do we think voting is so much less important than throwing away a candy bar wrapper?
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I don’t understand how you can say it’s mathematically sound and yet not democratic. You count the absentee and provisional ballots if there is any possibility of them changing the outcome.
However, if the number of ballots in question is less than the difference in the vote there’s no possibility of it changing the outcome and therefore no need to count them. Note that you must do this calculation for every matter that was on their ballot, one close election can cause the ballots to be counted.
Your comparison to the trash can has nothing to do with it–trash cans don’t exist for the purpose of being filled up, but to keep trash from being on the ground.
