Voting at Eagle Ridge

Okay...this is wearing heavily on my mind...was anyone else instructed to use a black sharpie on their ballot today? They had several booths supplied with sharpie markers and they bleed through to the other side of the ballot. When I asked the official about the validity of the results he scoffed at me and told me they had been doing it like that all day.
The instructions on the ballot request you use a #2 pencil or other provided writing utencil- but a marker?
What do you all think? Did I waste my vote?

 

I used the same marker.. I also read that we were supposed to use a pencil, but I figured that the markers were ok, since the booths were setup with markers, not pencils.

Denise

 

We used the markers at Hillside as well today.

 

I used a #2 pencil at Eagle Ridge. I would guess that by the time I got there at 12PM, the markers had run out of ink.

I wouldn't worry about the bleed-through, though. I am sure that the optical readers, like most others, are programmed to "look" for marks only in specific locations of the page. I don't specifically recall the ballot, but I would guess that the boxes on page 2 of the ballot are offset from those on page 1, so that the optical reader will not even notice any stray bleed-through marks.

 

Broad Run used felt markers, no bleed through that I noticed

 

Same marker at Hillside. Same one we used last election also.

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Got Broadband?

 

I used the marker at eagle ridge and didn't have any bleed through.

 

It said on the instructions to use a number 2 pencil OR THE MARKER PROVIDED.

 

Thanks for your replies!

 

Being one of the Election Officers at Hillside, the marking pens that were issued to us were not Sharpies. They were however, marker pens that would insure that the entire oval was dark enough for the ACCU-VOTE scanner to read.

The actual ballots are thin card stock, and the only way a 'bleed thru' would have happened if the person kept darkening the oval, or the pen was defective.

We were given an extra 30 pens for 8 voting booths, and I don't remember hearing that we replaced any.

The instructions do say to use a pencil OR the pens provided. Loudoun County has found that the use of the pens insures full tallying of votes. Out of 2303 votes tallied at Hillside, we did not have any that were not counted for President or Representative.

We did have a few people write in some people for Representative, and a few people did not vote any of the questions or bond issues.



Neil Z.
Resident since 1999

 

Thanks for the info, it seemed to me that the marker was a sharpie, but perhaps I was mistaken.