Here is an example of an inadvertent error by election workers.
It resulted in 188 voters in a Wisconsin town not being able to vote in the 2024 GOP primary election for a state assembly seat.
This happened because staff in the county election clerk’s office mixed up recently redrawn state legislative districts. The error was brought to their attention by a voter after it was too late to correct the ballots.
The wrong candidates were on those ballots, so those voters didn’t get to vote for the actual candidates, and their votes for the wrong candidates didn’t count.
The election was certified anyway. Why? Because the error didn’t affect the result. The incumbent legislator, Chanz Green, defeated his primary challenger, Scott Harbridge, by 3,955 to 3,034 votes. Even if all 188 voters had voted for Harbridge, it couldn’t have changed the result, so there was no logical reason to redo the election.
This illustrates how elections actually work in real life. Running elections is complicated, and honest mistakes happen. It’s important to realize they’re mistakes.
Now let’s consider mistakes in other walks of life. Pilot error happens, accounting errors happen, cashiers making incorrect change happens. A pilot who crashes a plane isn’t trying to murder the passengers (in most cases), a bookkeeper who makes an adding error isn’t an embezzler (in most cases), and a cashier who miscounts incorrectly isn’t trying to cheat the customer (in most cases).
So why would election mistakes be different? When you hold an election with hundreds of thousands of votes, it’s unreasonable to expect zero errors. There will nearly always be a few lost or miscounted ballots. If those mistakes matter to the result, there’s a legal process for correcting them. The fact they happened didn’t make the election fraudulent.
The late Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, “Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
Why are some humans dumber than dogs?