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Approval voting is a single-winner rated voting system in which voters mark all the candidates they support, instead of just choosing one. It is a form of score voting where only two scores are allowed: 0 and 1 (approved). The candidate with the highest approval rating is elected. Approval voting is currently in use for government elections in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Fargo, North Dakota, USA, and in the United Nations to elect the Secretary General.
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 7, 2000. Republican nominee, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, the eldest son of George H. W. Bush, narrowly defeated incumbent Democratic Vice President Al Gore. It was the fourth of five U.S. presidential elections, and the first since 1888, in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote, and is considered one of the closest U.S. presidential elections, with long-standing controversy about the result. Gore conceded the election on December 13 after the Supreme Court issued its decision.
Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in Florida's 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. Justice Antonin Scalia, contending that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately. On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that "counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm." Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.
The 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida was a period of vote recounting in Florida that occurred during the weeks after Election Day in the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush's favor by a margin of 537 votes out of 5,825,043 cast when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. Bush's win in Florida gave him a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.
A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machines. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by its mechanism, and whether the system tallies votes at each voting location, or centrally. Voting machines should not be confused with tabulating machines, which count votes done by paper ballot.
Third party, or minor party, is a term used in the United States' two-party system for political parties other than the Republican and Democratic parties.
Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots including voting time.
Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. It differs from but often goes hand-in-hand with voter suppression. What exactly constitutes electoral fraud varies from country to country, though the goal is often election subversion.
Vote counting is the process of counting votes in an election. It can be done manually or by machines. In the United States, the compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results is called canvassing.
In the politics of the United States, elections are held for government officials at the federal, state, and local levels. At the federal level, the nation's head of state, the president, is elected indirectly by the people of each state, through an Electoral College. Today, these electors almost always vote with the popular vote of their state. All members of the federal legislature, the Congress, are directly elected by the people of each state. There are many elected offices at state level, each state having at least an elective governor and legislature. There are also elected offices at the local level, in counties, cities, towns, townships, boroughs, and villages; as well as for special districts and school districts which may transcend county and municipal boundaries.
Voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or verified paper record (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters who use an electronic voting system. A VVPAT allows voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results. It contains the name and party affiliation of candidates for whom the vote has been cast. While VVPAT has gained in use in the United States compared with ballotless voting systems without it, hand-marked ballots are used by a greater proportion of jurisdictions.
During the 2004 United States elections, there was controversy around various aspects of the voting process, including whether voting had been made accessible to all those entitled to vote, whether ineligible voters were registered, whether voters were registered multiple times, and whether the votes cast had been correctly counted.
In voting, a ballot is considered spoilt, spoiled, void, null, informal, invalid or stray if a law declares or an election authority determines that it is invalid and thus not included in the vote count. This may occur accidentally or deliberately. The total number of spoilt votes in a United States election has been called the residual vote. In Australia, such votes are generally referred to as informal votes, and in Canada they are referred to as rejected votes.
Florida's 13th congressional district is an electoral district for the U.S. Congress on Florida's Gulf Coast, assigned to Pinellas County. The district includes Largo, Clearwater, and Palm Harbor. In the 2020 redistricting cycle, most of St. Petersburg facing Tampa Bay was redistricted into the 14th district, while the rest of Pinellas County formerly in the 12th district became included in the 13th district.
An overvote occurs when one votes for more than the maximum number of selections allowed in a contest. The result is a spoiled vote which is not included in the final tally.
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a single-winner, multi-round elimination rule that uses ranked voting to simulate a series of runoff elections. In each round, the last-place finisher according to a plurality vote is eliminated, and the votes supporting the eliminated choice are transferred to their next available preference until one of the options reaches a majority of the remaining votes. Instant runoff falls under the plurality-with-elimination family of voting methods, and is thus closely related to rules like the exhaustive ballot and two-round runoff system.
Electronic voting in the United States involves several types of machines: touchscreens for voters to mark choices, scanners to read paper ballots, scanners to verify signatures on envelopes of absentee ballots, adjudication machines to allow corrections to improperly filled in items, and web servers to display tallies to the public. Aside from voting, there are also computer systems to maintain voter registrations and display these electoral rolls to polling place staff.
In American politics, a blue shift, also called a red mirage, is an observed phenomenon under which counts of in-person votes are more likely than overall vote counts to be for the Republican Party, while provisional votes or absentee ballots, which are often counted later, are more likely than overall vote counts to be for the Democratic Party. This means that election day results can initially indicate a Republican is ahead, but adding provisional ballots and absentee ballots into the count can eventually show a Democratic victory.
Edward B. Foley, also known as Ned Foley, is an American lawyer, law professor, election law scholar, and former Ohio Solicitor General. He is the theorist of the blue shift, a phenomenon in American politics in which in-person votes overstate overall percentage of votes for the Republican Party, while provisional votes, which are counted after election day, tend to overstate overall percentage of votes for the Democratic Party. When the provisional votes are counted after the election, there is often a shift in totals toward the Democrat, or blue, candidate.
References
- ↑ "2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines". Election Assistance Commission. p. A-18. Archived from the original on 13 June 2008. Retrieved 3 November 2023.
- 1 2 3 "WNT: Explaining the Undervotes". ABC News . 30 November 2000. Archived from the original on 9 November 2020.
- ↑ Bump, Philip (14 December 2016). "1.7 million people in 33 states and DC cast a ballot without voting in the presidential race". The Washington Post . Archived from the original on 14 December 2016.
- 1 2 Alvarez, R. Michael; Katz, Jonathan N.; Hill, Jonathan N. (September 20, 2005). "Machines Versus Humans: The Counting and Recounting of Pre-scored Punchcard Ballots" (PDF). VTP Working Paper #32. Caltech/ MIT Voting Technology Project. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 November 2013. Retrieved 2008-06-12.
