27741: Kondrat (comment) blank ballots (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Kondrat <kondr8@gmail.com>

Kathleen smells a conspiracy because of the thousands of blank ballots in
the recent election for President of Haiti. "Voter blanc" is in fact a
legitimate tool of voters throughout the world, a means of expressing
dissatisfaction with all candidates (similar to the proposed "none of the
above" option in the US), or dissatisfaction with the current regime (not an
implausible sentiment for a Haitian voter who has endured life under the
"interim" "government" of the past two years), or dissatisfaction with the
manner in which the elections were conducted. If you go to the French
government website, you will find a heading for "Abstention, vote nul et
vote blanc: quelles differences?"

I was an official observer of the 1990 national elections in Nicaragua, and
I witnessed a good number of blank ballots when I watched the counting. The
election was the cleanest and most transparent I have ever seen ... much
more on the up and up than anything we see in the States.

If one had voted twice in the past 15 years for a candidate who had twice
been illegally removed from office before his term expired, one might be
tempted to "vote for him" in the only way one could, with a blank ballot.

Peter Kondrat