undervote stat on summary/sovc reports

Don Biz had a question out of Anchorage regarding their Summary report. They chose to “show” under votes (and blank votes), but not over votes. Their report was showing some under votes, even though the election was all vote-for-one. This confused the heck out of them, and me too for a moment.

What GEMS does when you choose to show under votes but not blank or over is assign those votes to the under vote statistic. This was by popular demand. Seeing it in action, it’s more than a little counterintuitive to see over votes reported as under votes. The concept is sound, but the nomenclature makes it tough to figure out what is going on. The blank vote case is pretty self-evident, since those are under votes of a sort.

I think we can improve this a little by changing the name of the statistic for the case that under votes are shown but over votes are not. The best name I can come up with is “uncast votes”. It would be fun to call them ‘missing votes”, but I think I can predict the reaction to that one. If anyone has a better name than uncast (which is not a word), I am all for it.

Ken