Well…technically Second Hand.

My mom was a district court judge in 1999. In 2000, she had to run for election (she was appointed to fill a vacant term by the governor.) As a friend of the outgoing probate judge – who tallied all the votes from the machines in an excel spreadsheet on his personal laptop (not even kidding) – she was able to get him to show her the exact voting results, precinct-by-precinct when she lost by only 0.4% of the vote. The results are frightening.

According to both state and federal election law, if a ballot is marked with a straight party vote at the top – for example, Republican or Democrat – and then the voter checks the box for a single candidate of the opposing party farther down the ballot, that is a spoiled ballot, and the machine is supposed to reject the ballot, after which a poll worker is supposed to walk over and explain that you must manually check each candidate individually in order to vote a split ticket. This did not occur.

After learning this, my mother had the newly sworn in replacement probate judge pull a random sampling of 1,000 ballots and count them. Out of these, 486 had checked the box for republican at the top, and then checked my mother’s name farther down the ballot. These ballots, despite clearly being a vote cast for my mother, were counted as votes fer her republican opponent. The 486 votes from this sampling along accounted for over 0.7% of the total vote – enough to cost her the election. Needless to say, her true margin of victory was probably well over 20%. Sadly, with the bush/gore fiasco in full swing, no decent election law attorneys were available, and my mother basically gave up.

On her watch, in a single year, she cleared a 13,000+ case backlog, with many cases dating back as far as 1986. Out of over 17,000 total rulings, she was appealed 3 times, and her ruling was upheld on appeal all 3 times. To date, she remains the best judge in the history of the state. Her replacement was court ordered to both drug and alcohol abuse treatment just 2 years before his election. On the day of his sentencing, having been fired from his law firm, he read a 2 page statement where he stated under oath that he was “not fit to practice law.” We learned this only 2 days before the election, and believing that nobody in their right mind would vote against someone with my mother’s record, we elected not to release the information (which was public record anyway, if the local paper had been interested to begin with.) Out of his first 9 scheduled court days, he locked himself in his office and refused to come out because he couldn’t face a courtroom full of people.

He has since recovered and does a pretty decent job running a fair courtroom. He does not keep as efficient of a schedule as my mother did, but he does seem to genuinely apply the law in a fair manner. Of course, it took him the better part of 6 years to get to that point. The fact remains that my mother won that election, and due to the lack of either oversight or understanding – and maybe both – of electronic voting systems, the citizens of our county were worse off for it.