Chapter 2 At 1105 (internal citations omitted).39 The first key to the supreme court’s decision in Gray-Sadler was its decision that a voter’s difficulty in casting a ballot could be tantamount to a denial of access to the polls, saying that situations where “qualified voters are denied access to the polls” are included under a state law that allows voters to challenge an election when “legal votes [have been] rejected at the polls sufficient to change the result.” Voters need not be physically barred from voting to have their votes rejected, but may instead show that, through no fault of their own, they were prohibited from voting for a specific candidate by some irregularity in the voting procedures. The essential question is whether voters were denied the opportunity to vote for a candidate of their choice. …In cases involving invalidated write-in votes, our courts have distinguished errors due to extrinsic problems from errors caused by a voter’s own neglect…[R]igid application of technical rules should not prevent otherwise valid write-in votes from being counted. At 1106 (internal citations omitted). The supreme court then reviewed a number of facts that showed that the voters knew exactly what they were doing when they tried to vote for the three write-in candidates: it was a small town where the writein candidates had campaigned vigorously together and sent mailings to all registered voters, some voters brought to the polls stickers with the candidates’ names on them and tried to put them in the proper place on the ballot, and many of the voided votes were cast in groups of three for the three write-in candidates. The supreme court spent an equal amount of time describing how the instructions were difficult to understand, and that state law specified steps that election officials could have taken to help voters understand how to cast write-in ballots—instructing voters on the use of the voting machines, providing a mechanical model, calling voters’ attention to a diagram on the face of the machines, providing information outside of the voting booths—but that the officials did not take those steps. In comparison, the instructions for voting for candidates whose names were printed on the ballot were clear, legible and illustrated by two separate diagrams; no mention of how to cast a write-in ballot was made on those instructions. The instructions on the sample ballots were even more confusing because they did not say that the machines had windows for casting write-in ballots. Under these circumstances, the supreme court said, Voters seeing conflicting and incomplete instructions for the first time on entering the booths were understandably confused, and their confusion is attributable to defects outside of their control. At 1107. This case is readily distinguishable from other cases in which voters’ failure to comply with specific procedural instructions invalidated their votes. In those other cases, voters were clearly and 39 Other cases have more closely considered the question of whether there is a right to cast a write-in ballot in elections, and if so, the circumstances under which that right can be exercised. That discussion is beyond the scope of this book, but you should be aware that there is serious disagreement with the New Jersey Supreme Court’s view that there is an unbridled right to cast a write-in ballot. See, e.g., Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428 (1992). 31