New NPR story on the non-usability of ballots, voting software, and other factors affecting our elections:
New York City’s voters were subject to a series of setbacks after the election board unrolled a perforated two-page ballot. Voters who didn’t know they had to tear at the edges to get at the entire ballot ended up skipping the middle pages. Then the fat ballots jammed the scanners, long lines formed, and people’s ballots got soaked in the rain. When voters fed the soggy ballots into scanners, more machines malfunctioned.
In Georgia, hundreds blundered on their absentee ballot, incorrectly filling out the birth date section. Counties originally threw out the ballots before a federal judge ordered they be counted.
And in Broward County, Fla., 30,000 people who voted for governor skipped the contest for U.S. Senate. The county’s election board had placed that contest under a block of multi-lingual instructions, which ran halfway down the page. Quesenbery says voters scanning the instructions likely skimmed right over the race.
She has seen this design before. In 2009, King County, Wash., buried a tax initiative under a text-heavy column of instructions. An estimated 40,000 voters ended up missing the contest, leading the state to pass a bill mandating ballot directions look significantly different from the contests below.
“We know the answers,” says Quesenbery. “I wish we were making new mistakes, not making the same old mistakes.”
The story didn’t even mention the issues with the “butterfly ballot” from Florida in 2000. Whitney Queensbery is right. We do know the answers, and we certainly know the methods for getting the answers. We need the will to apply them in our civics, not just commercial industry.