This week, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law released a report detailing how "eight years after the 2000 election ... the problems caused by poor ballot design have not been fully and effectively addressed on a national level":
Year in and year out, we see the same mistakes in ballot design, with the same results: tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of voters disenfranchised by confusing ballot design and instructions, sometimes raising serious questions about whether the intended choice of the voters was certified as the winner.
The report incorporates several examples of poor ballot design and offers suggested improvements. One of these case studies features the ballot used in downstate Hamilton County, IL in 2002. Here are the instructions:
And here's the ballot itself (click for full version):
The report explains the problem:
The races at the top of the first and second columns line up exactly. Reading left-to-right, many voters mistakenly marked the arrow to the right of a candidate’s name instead of the arrows to the left. Although the ballot instructions direct voters to complete the arrows to the left of their choices, there are few visual cues on the page. The small amount of space between columns makes it hard for voters to tell which arrow corresponds with the candidate for whom they’d like to vote.
Indeed, you can see how someone intending to vote for Republican comptroller candidate Tom Ramsdell might end up voting for Democratic State Senate candidate Larry Woolard. Or how someone wanting to vote for Blagojevich could instead punch the ballot for Ramsdell. Or how someone trying to vote for Dick Durbin could vote for Jesse White.
And indeed, the Brennan Center found that the number of residual votes for the U.S. senate and governor's races were significantly higher in Hamilton County than elsewhere in the state.
After reading the report, I called the Hamilton County clerk to see if they were still using the problematic ballots. The staff member I spoke with said the county switched to a different ballot design several years ago. She sent me an example from a local election in spring 2007. As you can see the design is much better, with a "fill the oval" system and boxes surrounding each group of candidates:
Another interesting tidbit from the report: Cook County, which was once notorious for its baffling ballot designs is now considered a national leader on this issue.
Anonymous on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 16:45
For all the complaining Tony Peraica did about Cook County Clerk David Orr (whilst losing to Todd Stroger) and for all the legitimate problems which still exist in the Cook voting system, Orr has done a bang-up job in modernizing that office and updating Cook's voting equipment.
I'd still like to see a true, voter-originated paper trail which the current Sequoia systems don't actually provide, but all in all Cook is lightyears better than it was with those lame ol' punch ballots.
But David Orr is a prime example of an elected official who takes his office and his role seriously and is working to make government better and efficient for the citizens.
markg8 on Wed, 07/23/2008 - 09:40
In DuPage for the most part we fill in the ovals and then submit our paper ballots to Diebold/Premier optiscan faith based scanners to count our votes. These machines along with the Diebold/Premier TSx touchscreen machines are undectable vote fraud enabling junk. On Super Tuesday the TSx in my polling place broke down at 8:30 am saying it was out of paper after 16 votes had been cast. It broke down again at 5:30 pm and the frustrated technical judge slapped a "do not use" sign on it.
The scanner broke down 6 minutes before the polls closed. It rejected a ballot that on inspection had no flaws. When the voter resubmitted it the machine took the ballot but did not register it on the counter. Her vote did not count.
The last few ballots were stuffed in the compartment in the front of the machine as per instructions. When it came time to count the vote I watched a judge pull the write in ballots out of the back compartment where the machine segregates them for hand counting. 5 of the 9 supposed write in ballots had no other marks than filled in ovals. If the scanner can't accurately deduce write ins from regular ballots, a simple task, I don't know how we can expect them to accurately count our votes.
You couple that with the widely known security holes that allow easy and undetectable tampering and what we have is faith based voting. Diebold may be the worst but none of them are any good.
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