Ink For Filling Out Ballots?

[MoriartyR]

I think you should use a shimmer ink for your ballot. They may decide to count it twice because you made the extra effort.

[inkstainedruth]

Thanks to all so far. I'm bound and determined to use an FP if at all possible because I abhor ballpoints. So Looks like my best bet so far is going to be Heart of Darkness after all -- it doesn't tend to bleed, and it dries fairly quickly (faster IME than Bulletproof Black). And I do remember it being pretty waterproof. I just would rather use a blue ink if I could.

I do have a bit of time to experiment, because it turns out that the ballot I got WAS one of the misprint ones after all. What a PITA. Called the borough office this morning and got told that they are NOT allowed to tell me anything and have to refer everyone to the county Board of Elections. Whose line of course was busy; gee, can't IMAGINE why.... (Oh, sorry, that was sarcasm.... Guess I'm going to have to change my name to Doug Piranha....)

So I looked up the email I got last week from the county's Director of Communications and called HER and yup, misprint ballot. She assures me I'll get it this week. Of course, she ALSO claimed that the state website where you can check your ballot status is WRONG.

Although I was somewhat amused by MoriartyR's suggestion.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Mysterious Mose]

I felt like an idiot, but think it'll turn our alright.

 

I got a New York absentee ballot but because of all the uncertainty, decided to vote early and in person. My plan became to fill out the absentee ballot but hold on to it. I will use it as a reference when I am voting in person. It incudes voting in contests for 9 state Supreme Court Justices, 2 NYC Civil Court Judges, a Unites States President and Vice-President, a Queens Borough President, a Congressional Representative, a state Senator and a state Assemblyman/woman. So I filled it out with blue ink in a fountain pen.

 

I was a little concerned because there is a little bleed-through, but it only bleeds through to blank areas for write-in votes. It might have been different if I were to vote other than up and down a particular party line. I never questioned the ink color until reading this thread. Duh.

 

As it turns out, nothing in the instructions says anything about ink color. The instructions, in their entirety and in English, read:

 

"Mark the oval to the left [sic] of the name of your choice. [Actually, the ovals are above the names, not to the left. Does this erroneous instruction invalidate all NY absentee ballots?]

 

"To vote for a candidate whose name is not printed on the ballot, mark the oval to the left of 'write-in' and print the name clearly, staying within the box. Any mark or writing outside the spaces provided for voting may void the entire ballot. You have a right to a replacement ballot. If you make a mistake or want to change your vote, call the board of elections at 718-730-6730 for instructions on how to obtain a new ballot. The number of choices is listed for each contest. Do not mark the ballot for more candidates than allowed. If you do, your vote in that contest will not count."

 

It appears that red ink would be satisfactory. Is that so?

[ParramattaPaul]

"BALLOTS"?

 

How many are YOU filling out? The allotted number is one and one only, or so I've been told.

Edited October 19, 2020 by ParramattaPaul

[silverlifter]

"BALLOTS"?

 

How many are YOU filling out? The allotted number is one and one only, or so I've been told.

 

 

After a double dissoultion in Oz, you get two ballots/papers to fill out, don't you?

[XYZZY]

Reading this thread makes me grateful that I live in Washington. We've been doing mail in voting for decades, and it has been the only option for close to a decade. Seventy dropoffs in the county that I live in, postage prepaid if you really want to return it in the mail, and it's easy to request a replacement if yours gets lost or you fill it out wrong. I do mine in black ballpoint, then go over them in black sharpie.

[Misfit]

I like using my fountain pens. But I just could not justify risking my ballot. It was ballpoint in black for mine. My state does not make it easy, and I want my vote to count. That’s why I drove to the county absentee ballots drop off site to hand deliver them (mine and my parents).

[kestrel]

"BALLOTS"?

 

How many are YOU filling out? The allotted number is one and one only, or so I've been told.

During the Mayor Richard Daley years in Chicago the motto was, "Vote early and often." People who had been dead and buried for years were still on the voting lists and still casting ballots or, rather, their proxies who were part of Daley's machine were casting ballots for them.

 

Me, I just did the ultimate crazy and cast a vote for a dead candidate. I mailed my ballot on Friday and said candidate made her final contribution to the carbon cycle the next day. Pity. Even in her present condition she would do a better job than the other one.

[corniche]

During the Mayor Richard Daley years in Chicago the motto was, "Vote early and often." People who had been dead and buried for years were still on the voting lists and still casting ballots or, rather, their proxies who were part of Daley's machine were casting ballots for them.

 

Me, I just did the ultimate crazy and cast a vote for a dead candidate. I mailed my ballot on Friday and said candidate made her final contribution to the carbon cycle the next day. Pity. Even in her present condition she would do a better job than the other one.

Hi Kestrel,

 

While death is rarely amusing; I can appreciate the irony of your situation: a few years ago, the very same thing happened here - and if that wasn't bad enough - it was the candidate for coroner who died.

 

 

- Sean

[gorneaux]

"BALLOTS"?

 

How many are YOU filling out? The allotted number is one and one only, or so I've been told.

There are three different sheets to the California election ballot, with candidates (federal, state and local) and propositions (measures) on both sides.

[ParramattaPaul]

 

After a double dissoultion in Oz, you get two ballots/papers to fill out, don't you?

We're not having an election ---- yet, but, the US is.

[gorneaux]

After due consideration I felt I needed to bring my best game to this, so I took up my 1990 Parker Duofold Centennial—burgundy marble, monogrammed, even. It feels like my most staid, dignified, federal pen, and, even though by this point the Duofold was being made in England, my most American one. It was filled with Iroshizuku Yama-guri. Even if its provenance wasn't entirely appropriate to the occasion, it's an ink named after wild chestnut, and what could be more evocative of the spirit of American Independence? Besides which it's about a dark a brown as you can get before black, so it fit the "dark ink" prescription in the instructions.

Edited October 20, 2020 by gorneaux

[A Smug Dill]

I know you feel that you must make an attempt at representing your values, but it is after all only a vote and if a ballpoint fixes the problem, why not?

Moreover, in my understanding a citizen's vote in a general election is intended to be anonymous, faceless, untraceable and indistinguishable from any other vote by one of however many thousands or millions of equal nobodies, and carries an equal and proportionately minuscule weight irrespective of how much or how little the voter cares about the outcome. (Note for non-Aussies: Voting is compulsory in Australia, with penalties for failing to participate, so the 'game' is not so much about getting supporters of a party or side of politics to actually get out and vote, but to get those who don't care that much but have to show up on election day anyway to cast their votes your way instead of the other or 'waste'/void their ballot papers once their names have been ticked off.)

 

Here in Oz we vote with pencils on paper ballots mostly.

 

By the way, for those of you who haven't seen one before, these are real examples of our ballot papers for the Senate.

 

My wife and I always vote "below the line" and give every presented candidate — even when there are close to a hundred in all — a unique number to show our orders of preference, instead of "above the line" and vote for parties as opposed to individuals. That's our way of "personalising" our approach, not by using a particular (style or type of) pen or ink, but by making work within the voting guidelines, for election officials who have to dutifully record our nuanced preferences for tallying; given the size of the ballot paper and the number of candidates listed on it, I question whether automatic scanning and OCR can be used to process returned ballot papers for "below the line" voting; I suspect a lot of those will be manually handled by exception, and in which case they cannot reject a ballot paper for using an ink that's blue or black but doesn't scan well.

 

The other thing we usually do is, in accordance with the instructions, fold our ballot papers so that our selections cannot be seen, before sticking them through the slots of the corresponding collection boxes. Since there are no other, or more detailed, instructions or guidelines on how to fold, we tend to make paper aeroplanes or origami (without cutting) out of the ballot papers.

 

We're not having an election ---- yet, but, the US is.

 

 

Wasn't there one just this past weekend for the Australian Capital Territory, and another one in New Zealand?

[inkstainedruth]

During the Mayor Richard Daley years in Chicago the motto was, "Vote early and often." People who had been dead and buried for years were still on the voting lists and still casting ballots or, rather, their proxies who were part of Daley's machine were casting ballots for them.

 

Me, I just did the ultimate crazy and cast a vote for a dead candidate. I mailed my ballot on Friday and said candidate made her final contribution to the carbon cycle the next day. Pity. Even in her present condition she would do a better job than the other one.

Ironically, when we moved back to Pittsburgh from the Boston area, my husband discovered that he was still on the PA voter rolls -- which meant that he could have (had he but known) technically voted in both PA and MA!

In my case it HAS ended up being the case of ballots, plural. The one I got last week in the mail is one of the ~29,000 misprinted ones. And I got a song and dance from the County Director of Communications about how I shouldn't "trust" the website where you can track the status of your ballot.... I'm not sure I can trust HER when she told me yesterday that I'll get the corrected ballot by the end of the week. Especially after seeing a story on the noon news just now about some woman whose ballot got sent to her PARENTS' house and the same chick apparently told her she could just fix the address. The only *useful* information I've gotten from the dumb cluck is how the replacement ballot envelope will be marked.

Although I did hear on the news last night that the courts have ruled that ballots that were mailed will still be valid three days after Election Day.

My husband has distrusted the process so much that he's going to vote in person, come Hell or high water.... And he keeps checking the ballot status website to make sure nobody has applied for a ballot in his name instead of their own. Me? I'm considering calling the TV station where I saw the noon news, and talk to the same investigative reporter that Zoom-interviewed me and some guy during the Primary about "My ballot hasn't arrived!" Unfortunately, some of the things I said in the interview were cut due to "time considerations" -- and those were the statements that I personally felt were the most important points....

Much as I really want to use blue ink, I suspect that Heart of Darkness really is going to be my best bet. The way that voting by mail is working in PA is that you fill out your ballot, seal it in an envelope that has no markings on it other than "Official Election Ballot" and then put that sealed envelope I've considered calling a friend of ours, who is an optical engineer, to say "Hey, just how accurate are those optical scanners for color, anyway? Any clue?"

Frankly, I'll be glad when the election is over. I'm getting really tired of the junk mail political flyers (and now my husband has gotten onto some mailing list from the other major party -- i.e., my party -- because they've somehow got it into their pointy little heads that he agrees with them. Heck, *I* don't agree them 98% of the time at this point.... But staying in it means I DO get to vote in the primary races.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Astronymus]

For such cases I would use a ballpoint. Because there is also the imprint.

[ParramattaPaul]

Wasn't there one just this past weekend for the Australian Capital Territory, and another one in New Zealand?

 

That's them. Queensland is on now. NSW nope.

[ENewton]

Moreover, in my understanding a citizen's vote in a general election is intended to be anonymous, faceless, untraceable and indistinguishable from any other vote by one of however many thousands or millions of equal nobodies, and carries an equal and proportionately minuscule weight irrespective of how much or how little the voter cares about the outcome.

 

Where I live, one has to sign on the outside of the envelope, so although votes are, in principle, not traceable, in fact anyone with access to both the envelopes and the ballots could trace them.

[Paganini]

I don't actually have any ballpoint pens. I have a few gel pens thrown in a drawer upstairs, but from past experience I suspect they would be even worse on US ballot card stock than fountain pen ink.

 

Anyway, there's a tab on the ballots (at least, there were here in GA) that says "remove before returning," so I just tore that off and used it as an ink-testing area. I think I ended up using Pelikan 4001 Blue Black, but there were several that worked well - among them LAMY Black and Platinum Blue Black (of course). The "normal" permanent inks I had handy (Platinum Carbon Black, Noodler's Black Eel) ran right through.

 

- N

[inkstainedruth]

Here in PA they are paper ballots, not card stock. Of course, even it they were card stock, and I filled it out ahead of time, I could still have plenty of time before sealing the ballot up in the security envelope for the ink to dry (of course, that's another plus for Heart of Darkness).

I do have to sign the outer envelope, but under state law they are not allowed to open the ballots until 7 AM until Day. At least from what they were showing on the news last night, they have machines to open the outer envelopes, and then run the ballots through the inner envelope (which is not supposed to have anything written on it other than what is already printed on it: "Official Election Ballot".

There is of course still the option of bringing the (unmailed) ballot, with both envelopes, to my regular voting station here in town on Election Day, and voting in person after turning the ballot and both envelopes in to election officials.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

edited for typos

Edited October 21, 2020 by inkstainedruth

[Runnin_Ute]

Using Pelikan 4001 Blue Black