Simple Election Ballots

Washington had the closest election for state governor in the nation's history. Election and first recounts gave a narrow victory to one candidate, and the final count reversed the election and gave us a governor with a 129 vote margin.

At issue is the accuracy of counts by machines, scanners, and the like. Each recount found more votes lying in the bottoms of machines and otherwise not counted the first time or two. The whole thing reminds us of Landslide Lyndon's 87 vote victory for Congress in Texas a couple of lifetimes ago.

Marking ballots in pencil with a big X seems simple enough. No need to try to decipher "voter intent", no need to count the number of corners of chads that broke. But it takes forever to count the damn things.

The owner of a supermarket I worked in as a kid did not count the coins when filling out deposit slips for the bank. He weighed each denomination of coin and calculated the amount based on weight. It was far more accurate than counting coins.

A solution for Florida and now Washington election problems: For each race, issue a standard size, standard weight paper ballot. Voter marks an X for the preferred candidate. Vote counters pile the ballots in separate piles for each Xed candidate, and then weigh them. Vote count could be extrapolated extremely accurately from the weights. If weights are too close to call, then count them manually. That shouldn't happen often, and, if it does, one manual count settles it.