"Election officials who use punch card systems similar to the one in Palm Beach County expect that a certain number of ballots will have more than one hole punched in a given race, a practice called 'overvoting.'"
—Don Van Natta, Jr, and Dana Canedy, "Florida Democrats Say Ballot's Design Hurt Gore," The New York Times, November 9, 2000
Overvoting isn't a new word (a quick check showed it being used at least as far back as 1984), but it's definitely topical! (Note, too, that you see
over-voting at least as much as
overvoting.) There's even an
overvote (verb) in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1641, but it's an obsolete word that means "to defeat by a majority of votes."
The opposite of overvoting is, of course, undervoting, which means not choosing any candidate on an election ballot.
My favorite voter quote so far:
"I did find [the Palm Beach ballot] confusing and I'm a member of Mensa."
