billroper | (Reply)

From:

It really depends why they weren't counted. (and NY is not IL, nor is it MI, but....) IIRC, NY (like many states) runs both partisan primaries at the same time, on the same ballot. People often vote in both primaries even though they are specifically informed that they shouldn't. If a voter votes in both of the primaries, none of those votes count. That is highly unlikely to happen in November, where splitting your vote is allowed.

I worked an absentee count board (in MI), and we probably had a quarter of the votes not count. The ballots were scanned, true, but due to Voter Error (aka, The Inability To Read AND FOLLOW the Damn Instructions Clearly Printed At The Top Of Each Side Of The Damn Ballot*), many of the votes didn't count. The votes in the non-partisan elections (millage, etc) were counted. If those people had voted in person, their mistakes would probably have been caught.

Whether they would have cared enough to change how they voted? Dunno about that. The people who worked the walk-in floor said that they had probably half a dozen people refuse to change their ballots, even though the scanner threw the plain English code that said that they'd voted in each of the partisan primaries.

(* gosh, jenn, tell us what you really think. No, there'd be even more swearing.)

edit for clarity. i hope