Voting with invisible ink

MY FIRST RULE for this site is to post stories about Japan and northeast Asia exclusively. Sometimes, however, rules just beg to be broken, so I’ll make an exception for this story about the primary election held in Chicago, Illinois, on Tuesday.

Twenty voters at a Far North Side precinct who found their ink pens not working were told by election judges not to worry.

It’s invisible ink, officials said. The scanner will count it.

But their votes weren’t recorded after all.

“Part of me was thinking it does sound stupid enough to be true,” said Amy Carlton, who had serious doubts but went ahead and voted anyway.

This will not surprise many Americans–it was a Chicago election, remember. In the U.S. they still talk about how the Illinois votes that would have elected Richard Nixon as president in 1960 over John Kennedy are lying at the bottom of Lake Michigan. (True story: When Kennedy complained to his father several weeks after the election about how difficult it was to recruit and select the members of his Cabinet, his father replied, “You don’t have to take the job if you don’t want it, Jack. They’re still counting the votes up in Chicago.”)

The newspaper quoted Amy again:

Both women agreed that this election meant a lot. They had spent a good deal of time researching candidates.

“I have been voting since I was 18,” said Carlton, 38. “This is the most important election of my life so far.”

That explains a lot.

Back to Japanese subject matter later today!