As a lifetime resident of Palm Beach County, I consider myself an expert on ballots and elections in general. By unofficial count, there are about two dozen of us from Palm Beach County currently on campus, but even if all of us managed to vote incorrectly (and I'm marginally sure I did it right), that doesn't come close to explaining why 55 people on this campus didn't vote correctly in Thursday's student body election.

For starters, 27 people abstained from voting in this election. That's right. 27. There are 27 people on this campus who went to the trouble of showing their ID to an election official, taking a ballot, and then deciding to return it empty. Think about it. There are 27 people at this University (11 in Dillon alone) who, when reflecting back upon Election Day, will proudly say to themselves, "I put a blank ballot into a ballot box, and therefore, I deliberately voted for no one."

I'm guessing a handful of them were making a silent political protest, assuming that in the midst of counting the ballots, one election official would scream, "Mother of God, someone turned in a blank ballot! We need to reform our ways!" and then proceed to leap out a window.

Of even more concern are the 28 people on this campus who turned in invalid ballots. This number doesn't include the relatively small number of write-in ballots — that is, those students felt too confined by the given choices, and therefore opted to write in the name of a cherished childhood pet. I don't even know how it's possible for someone to turn in an invalid ballot. An abstention, I can sort of understand, like maybe in all the excitement of voting, people just forgot to mark their candidate, or maybe their dorm's judicial board failed to provide adequate writing utensils. An invalid ballot in a runoff election, though, is pretty unsettling.

For the 4,000 of you who didn't vote, let me briefly describe the ballot in question. It was small, blue, and featured two sets of names, each accompanied by a line wherein voters were expected to make an identifying mark indicating which of the two sets of names they preferred. Twenty-eight people failed to do this correctly. Twenty-eight of our classmates mangled the voting process so horrifically that their ballot couldn't even be considered an abstention.

I'm venturing a guess that some of these people didn't want to hurt either candidate's feelings and thus attempted to vote for everyone, though no rational explanation can justify voting for both parties in an election with only two candidates. At least the abstainers didn't waste any ink (unless they wrote, "I am leaving this blank in a silent political protest.") Voting for both people is something Archie Andrews does when he can't decide between Betty and Veronica for Miss Riverdale. Voting for both people shouldn't be happening at the university level.

So, for the 55 of you who either forgot to mark down a selection or are too polite to participate in democracy, take solace in the fact that you at least tried to vote, and that's all that matters. Four thousand students didn't vote at all, and in the long run, that's what worries me the most.

• Voting for no one