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December 09, 2005

Brodie goes to court

The Atlanta District 6 election challenge will move to a Northwest Georgia court because local courts are not allowed to hear election challenges in their jurisdiction. At issue is whether write-in ballots should be combined with non-first place finishers (in this case, there were only 2 candidates) when the combination would prevent the first place finisher from receiving a 50% majority.

Brodie argues yes, that these write-in voters had their constitutional rights violated when Atlanta elections officials disqualified their votes because they did not vote for registered write-in candidates. We are about to find out whether the courts think throwing out a vote cast for "Mickey Mouse" violates the rights of the voter.

My own take is that it does not violate the right of the voter. We hold elections to elect living, breathing people who want the job. If Mickey Mouse can win an election, we're in trouble because he does not exist. If you want to run for office, you can either qualify (expensive) or register as a write-in candidate (cheap). But if you don't want to hold that office, votes for you shouldn't be counted -- you're effectively the same as Mickey Mouse. Plain and simple.

I'd be willing to consider one possible exception to that rule, which is write-in voters who vote for themselves. Clearly if they are voting for themselves, they want the job. At the same time, determining who cast a write-in vote violates the secrecy of the ballot, and again if you want the office that badly you should have either qualified or registered in advance.

Accepting all of what I've written above, it basically comes down to this: should the illegal write-in voters get to recast ballots in a runoff because they failed to choose from the legal list of candidates the first time? I once again side against Brodie on this point, because voters who skip a race don't prevent a candidate from reaching 50%, and these write-in voters are essentially skipping this race the same as the others. The denominator should only be affected if you choose from a list of valid candidates in the race, and not if you throwaway your vote either by voting for "Mickey Mouse" or skipping the race altogether. Voters may not have liked their choice in this race, but that's too bad. It's not as if a runoff between the same two candidates will offer a different one.

Posted by Chris at December 9, 2005 02:56 AM

Comments

Posted by: rusty at December 9, 2005 08:47 AM

Posted by: chris at December 12, 2005 01:44 PM

Posted by: rusty at December 12, 2005 04:31 PM

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