The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges unambiguously instructed to punch or mark the ballot in a designated box next to the candidate’s name and warned that if the marking was not made, the ballot would not be counted…More analogous are cases that discuss the provision of defective voting machines…In the end, qualified voters have been disenfranchised. At 1108-1109 (internal citation omitted). Having found that the confusing instructions constituted irregularities that deprived voters wanting to cast write-in ballots of their right to vote, the supreme court focused on “whether the ‘rejected’ votes were sufficient to change the result.” Simple deviance from statutory election procedures, absent fraud or malconduct, will not vitiate an election unless those contesting it can show that as a result of irregularities “the free expression of the popular will in all human likelihood has been thwarted.”…Only when those irregularities “are such that the court cannot with reasonable certainty determine who received the majority of the legal vote,” can a court set aside an election… At 1109. In viewing the evidence in the case, the supreme court reached another key juncture in its reasoning when it said, “The standard we apply is one of reasonable certainty as opposed to absolute certitude.” At 1110. The evidence showed that there were enough write-in votes for Ms. Gray-Sadler to make her the winner of the mayoral election if they were counted. The irregularities that affected those ballots, therefore, changed the result of the election. But the evidence did not show that there were enough rejected write-in votes to have made Mr. Sturgis and Mr. Geiger winners. Under the analysis applied by the New Jersey Supreme Court, that amount of proof was not required. The supreme court noted that 83 of the voters did not cast a ballot for mayor, and 215 voters did not cast a ballot for the council seats. Although some of those voters may have simply decided not to vote for those offices, there is a strong possibility that enough of those “missing votes” were not cast because of the confusing… instructions. At 1110. This conclusion was bolstered by the testimony: one witness said that she did not vote because the instructions were too confusing. Other witnesses testified about how difficult it was to cast write-in ballots, although they were able to do so. Another witness left the voting machine booth to ask an election official to explain the write-in procedure, as a warning on the instructions directed, and then lost her right to vote when the official went into the booth and pulled the machine’s lever to enter the voter’s vote before she was finished voting.40 In sum, the supreme court said, Because Sturgis and Geiger would have lost by about only ten votes if the voided write-in votes were counted, only a small number of the “missing votes” would have changed the election. Accordingly, we conclude that Sturgis and Geiger also meet the statutory requirement for successfully contesting the results of the council election. At 1110. 40 A state law prohibited voters from reentering a voting booth once the voter left and said that after a voter left the booth his or her vote was cast and could not be changed. 32