Potential Problems
At their best, provisional ballots provide voters who would otherwise be turned away from the polls to have their votes counted, but at their worst, the offer of a provisional ballot can be "a way to brush off troublesome voters by letting them think they have voted." It is possible for parties to force certain voters to cast provisional ballots so they can suppress the vote total of an opponent being counted on election night.
In the 2004 US Presidential Election, controversy arose out of arguments regarding the interpretation of the criteria for determining the eligibility of voters using provisional ballots. Many allege that these discrepancies of interpretations, particularly in Ohio, may have been a deciding factor in the outcome of the election. In the 2004 election, at least 1.9 million provisional ballots were cast, and 676,000 were never counted due to various states' rules on counting provisional ballots.
Studies of the use of provisional ballots in the 2006 general election in the United States show that around 21% of provisional ballots were rejected, where the majority of rejected ballots were cast by registered voters and the majority of rejections were for reasons that were preventable.
Read more about this topic: Provisional Ballot
Famous quotes containing the words potential and/or problems:
“Raising a daughter is an extremely political act in this culture. Mothers have been placed in a no-win situation with their daughters: if they teach their daughters simply how to get along in a world that has been shaped by men and male desires, then they betray their daughters’ potential But, if they do not, they leave their daughters adrift in a hostile world without survival strategies.”
—Elizabeth Debold (20th century)
“Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)