# Voter Intent **Voter intent** is the governing legal standard for reading an imperfectly marked ballot: where the voter has not followed the printed instructions, the ballot is counted anyway if the official can determine what the voter meant. It is the near-universal American rule — 48 states have it in a statute, an administrative rule or an official manual — and it is the standard that [[Bush v. Gore]] found constitutionally insufficient standing alone, because a direction to divine intent with no sub-rules produces different answers in different counties. The important structural point is that voter intent is a **standard, not a rule**: it tells an official what question to answer and not how to answer it. The sub-rules that actually decide cases — whether a check mark counts, how much of an oval must be filled, whether a circled name is a vote, what a crossed-out oval with a correction elsewhere means — are what vary across the fifty states, and they almost never live in the same instrument as the intent standard itself. See [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]] for the fifty-state comparison and for the four instrument types those sub-rules live in. A second point the crosswalk makes: the intent standard is addressed to a **human**, and on most American ballots the first reader is a scanner applying a pixel-density threshold. The intent standard therefore governs only the ballots the machine declines to read — which makes the scanner's configuration, not the legal standard, the thing that decides which ballots the legal standard is ever applied to. Expand with: the state-by-state statutory language, the Florida 2000 litigation that produced the modern standard, and the post-[[Bush v. Gore]] case law on how specific sub-rules must be. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-06 ASCII map build for [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Ballot Marking Validity Crosswalk]] - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] - [[Ballot Adjudication]] - [[Overvote]] · [[Undervote]] - [[Bush v. Gore]] - [[Help America Vote Act]]