From Deseret News archives:
Personal Choice — not personal choice
Thousands of voters flocked to the Personal Choice party Tuesday, many of them unwittingly, apparently drawn in by the name and the smiley face used as the party's logo. While the party and smiley face are genuine, many voters may have chosen the party because they thought it equated an option to choose their own candidate, election observers said.
How else can one explain the Personal Choice party receiving well over 10 percent in some counties on straight party votes? In some counties, the party received almost the same amount of straight party votes as the Democrats.
Typically third parties receive 1 percent or less, which was the case for the other third parties on the ballot this election.
In the end, the confusion did not significantly help any of the party's individual candidates, since none of them received more than 2 percent of the vote.
Calls to Ken Larsen, who founded the Personal Choice party in 2004, were not returned Wednesday.
The error could help prove two things about the new electronic voting machines. One, the biggest problems will probably be caused by human error. At the same time, it also demonstrated that voter mistakes can be prevented by essentially forcing a voter to double- or triple-check his or her ballot.
On the new machines, even a voter casting a straight-party ballot must go through the entire ballot, but on the races where their chosen party has a candidate, that selection is preselected by the machine. A voter can deselect that candidate and choose another one, which most of the Personal Choice straight-party voters had to do.
It also means that a voter must consciously choose not to vote on non-partisan races, ballot questions and constitutional amendments. With the old paper ballot, a voter could punch the party of choice and cast theballot without even looking at the rest of it.
Joe Demma, the chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, who oversees elections in Utah, said that ballots showing up on the screen are set by the county clerks, so the state cannot control where a party appears when voters are given the option of voting a straight-party ticket. They also cannot put many restrictions on the names that are used by parties or what logo they use.
But he did not want to dismiss the straight-party votes out-of-hand, either, even if most of the voters changed their votes for individual candidates.
"I don't think it's an issue of voter error," he said. "This is an issue where people wanted to make their own, personal choice."
E-mail: jloftin@desnews.com
