Spoiled ballot
A spoiled ballot or spoilt vote is a ballot which suggests that the voter did not followed the provided instructions. A ballot is often 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.[1][2] This may occur accidentally or deliberately. The total number of spoiled ballots in a United States election has been called the "residual vote".[3] In Australia, such votes are generally referred to as "informal votes", and in Canada they are referred to as "rejected votes".
In some jurisdictions, the number of spoiled ballots are counted and reported.
References
- ↑ Because English is a language that divides the United Kingdom and the United States (among other places), the Wikipedia article is a disaster. We should fix that on electowiki, at least. WTF is "residual vote", anyway? Are lawyers copying whole paragraphs out of Wikipedia (and possibly editing it to suit their purposes)?
- ↑ The w:spoilt_vote article as of 10:23, 27 February 2023 (UTC): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spoilt_vote&oldid=1129052052
- ↑ Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, Residual Votes Attributable to Technology: An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment, version 2, 3 Mar. 2001, http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~voting/Caltech_MIT_Report_Version2.pdf