# Overvote An **overvote** is a ballot on which more candidates are marked for a single office than there are seats to fill. The contest is voided; the rest of the ballot still counts. Its opposite, a contest left blank or marked too faintly to read, is an [[Undervote]]. ## What federal law requires Overvotes are the one marking error federal law addresses directly. 52 U.S.C. § 21081(a)(1)(A)(iii) requires a voting system to notify the voter of an overvote and give them the chance to correct the ballot before it is cast and counted. But § 21081(a)(1)(B) lets a paper-ballot, central-count or mail jurisdiction meet the same duty with a voter-education program and printed instructions. The guarantee is therefore real only where the scanner sits in the polling place with the voter still present. ## How equipment changes the rate Whether an overvote is caught depends on where the ballot is read: - **[[Ballot Marking Device]]s** make an overvote impossible: the screen will not accept more selections than the contest allows. - **Precinct-count [[Optical Scan Voting System]]s** reject or flag an overvoted ballot and hand it back, so the voter can spoil it and mark a new one. - **Central-count scanners and mail ballots** catch nothing until the voter is gone. The overvote is found at tabulation, sent to [[Ballot Adjudication]], and judged under the state's [[Voter Intent]] rules. Some states let adjudicators count a contest where the voter plainly marked one candidate and then tried to cross it out; others void it. ## Florida 2000 The [[2000 Presidential Election]] made the overvote famous. A consortium of news organizations (the *New York Times*, *Wall Street Journal*, *Washington Post*, CNN, AP and others) hired NORC at the University of Chicago to examine the **175,010** Florida ballots that recorded no valid presidential vote. About **62,000** were undervotes, the only category the Florida Supreme Court ordered recounted before [[Bush v. Gore]] stopped the recount. The rest, roughly 113,000, were overvotes, which no court ordered reviewed. Political scientist Walter Mebane later found that the overvoted ballots included **more than 50,000 votes intended for Bush or Gore** and then discarded. He traced the losses mainly to equipment that gave voters no warning. His estimate: had every Florida county used precinct-count optical scanners, the best system in the state that year, Gore would have won by more than 30,000 votes. The overvote-notice requirement in the [[Help America Vote Act]] (2002) is the direct legislative answer to that finding. ## See Also - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] · [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]] - [[Undervote]] · [[Ballot Adjudication]] · [[Voter Intent]] - [[Help America Vote Act]] · [[Bush v. Gore]]