A voter circles or underlines the name of Candidate "Y" but does not actually make an "X" or "line" on the ballot...?
Is this a vote for "Y"...?
Yes.
Uh...depends on what the guideline says.
Overvote.
Now that's an overstatement. Although I've noticed that, here in Germany, there are more "funny" ballots in working class areas than in more white-collar precincts.
On the whole, this is rather too complicated. Part 2 is exactly as it should be, though. If there are any inclarities about your registration, government should not have the right to remove you from the list without having successfully contacted you first. breaching this rule should also mean jail.
A rather weak replacement for a paper ballot...
There is no desire to fix the system, however...
Some more points that need to be addressed:
There will have to be uniform standards of registration, ballot design etc across the voting area (state, in the case of elector ["presidential"] elections.)
Given the many, many things Americans are allowed to vote on, a purely hand counted paper ballot will be impractical. I'd advocate some sort of machine-readable paper ballot (such as the optical scan thing Vorlon lines out) with
all ballots in
all elections machine counted on election night and hand counted in the two weeks after.
The hand count result is the valid official result. The election night coutn is for information value only.
