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Butterfly ballot article and image from Palm Beach newspaper.
She says she was trying to be sensitive to the failing eyesight of Palm Beach County's plentiful elderly population. Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, a veteran of almost three decades in the business, decided to make the names on the ballot bigger to let older voters see them better. But with 10 presidential candidates, one page could not contain them. So the names were put on facing pages.
Another straight-on image of the butterfly ballot from Chicago newspaper.
The angled view of the ballot as seen by voters of medium height.
Statistical discussion showing the outlier on plots of the voting data and detailing the regression analysis.
Florida statutes specifying column list of candidates and holes to the right of the list. The site is database-driven, so look for:
101.141
Specifications for primary election ballot
101.151 Specifications
for general election ballot
Richard L. Brandt wrote in November's Upside:
Everyone involved with technology should keep that Florida ballot in mind when creating the interface between human and machine. If perfectly normal people can screw that one up, how will they deal with your new product?
An electoral butterfly
effect
by Robert C. Sinclair, Melvin M. Mark, Sean E. Moore, Carrie A. Lavis &
Alexander S. Soldat
Nature 408, 665-666; December 2000
The infamous 'butterfly'-style ballot card used by Palm
Beach County, Florida, in the recent US presidential election causes voting
errors to be made and raises doubt over the final result. That's not the
conclusion of a Democrat-led inquiry, but the finding of psychologists who have
examined the controversial ballot paper in new experimental trials.
Robert Sinclair of the University of Alberta and colleagues report in a Brief
Communication this week that some Canadian shoppers made a crucial mistake in
simulated voting, for a Canadian prime minister, of exactly the type that may
have given Pat Buchanan votes intended for Al Gore. Of 53 people using the
double-column butterfly ballot, four made mistakes; three of these involved
voting for the candidate in the wrong column. By contrast, a similarly sized
group of shoppers given a simpler, single-column ballot made no mistakes.
Dan Bricklin's Weblog
We know from lots of examples of usability studies that
errors on tasks arising from "dumb mistakes" are very common, with
rates of easily 5%, 10%, or more. Elections, even important ones like for
President of the United States, are often decided by much slimmer margins than
that.
We should address this problem not just for the current election in Florida. In
some areas usability should be given as much concern as voter and official fraud
because it probably has a greater effect.
Kevin Fox's Basis for Alternate Interpretations of the Palm Beach Ballot
There are at least three clear cognitive paths by which voters in Palm Beach, Florida could have miscast their intended vote for Gore as a vote for Buchanan, or as a double vote for both Gore and Buchanan.
Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com
The Florida ballot clearly had usability problems, caused by the attempt to map a two-column set of labels onto a one-column action area. A direct mapping between two single-column areas would have been much less error-prone. However, I don't want to pass any judgment as to whether this usability problem cost Al Gore the Presidency because there were so many other usability problems in other states that might have influenced the count there. All we can really say is that it is obvious that the people who create voting designs don't bother much with usability.
Bruce Tognazzini's AskTog
This is yet another disgraceful example of what happens when
you don't bother to user test.
Why were the designers unable to see the problem, even without testing? Because
they were not users, they were designers. As such, they were interested in all
10 candidates on the ballet (plus space for a write in), and they saw all ten
candidates. They viewed the ballot as a 2X6 staggered matrix with a line of
radio buttons in between the two sides. Their cute little arrows appeared to be
enough to help people choose the right box from this matrix.
The voters saw things very differently. They were not interested in 10
candidates. They were interested in one candidate, the one they wanted to vote
for. Their entire focus was on finding that candidate and punching the hole next
to his or her name. In the case of Gore, that required scanning only two names
down in the first column. There was never any reason at all for Gore voters to
ever even see the right hand column, and we now have 23,000 pieces of evidence
that they, indeed, didn't. Rather than a staggered matrix, they saw a single
column with a dedicated column of radio buttons adjoining.
... Sure, it's easy enough to see now what a stupid design it was, now that they
game is over. That's what user testing is for. So you can play the game before
you play the game.
Disenfranchised
by design: voting systems and the election process
by Susan King Roth
Information Design Journal, v 9, n 1, 1998
Susan Roth describes two studies in Franklin County, Ohio.
In the first, the mechanical lever voting machine was compared with an
'electronic ballot' device in which switches are embedded in a surrounding
print-out. The second study examined the punch-card ballot, not that dissimilar
to the system which has cause so much fuss in Palm Beach County in recent days.
In both cases, Roth's study found serious problems in human factors and
information design, compromising the ability of people to make accurate and
informed electoral choices. This article points to endemic problems of
usability in the US electoral process, ultimately driven by the large number
of choices which a US voter is required to make at the polling booth, and the
over-riding concern of election officials to make vote-counting faster by means
of technology -- to the detriment of usability by voters.
Phil Agre's URLs on the 2000 US Presidential Elections
Ballot design illegal under Florida law from New York Times.
Ballots
Need an Upgrade -- Duh! (Politics 2:00 a.m. PST)
by Farhad Manjoo
Wired News, November 10, 2000
Talk about a glitch. How can a country that embraces the information age trust its democracy to a mistake-ridden balloting system that hasn't been updated since the 1960s?
Sen. Bob Kerrey calls
for a new vote in Florida from Salon.
Yahoo article
Time article.
Histories of voter fraud
Dade and Broward counties from Feed.
Bush
Set to Fight An Electoral College Loss
by Michael Kramer
NY Daily News, November 1, 2000
They're not only thinking the unthinkable, they're planning
for it.
Quietly, some of George W. Bush's advisers are preparing for the ultimate
"what if" scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for
President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of
electoral votes?
Critical discussion of proposed online voting schemes by Lauren Weinstein.
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 16:17:14 EST
From: HRMG@aol.com
Here are the facts about the vote in Florida and Palm Beach County. There were
5,972,319 total votes cast in Florida with Bush having 2,909,199 and Gore
2,907,544 ... a difference of 1,655 votes. Ralph Nader won 96,896 total votes in
Florida and Pat Buchanan received 20,294...1.62% and .34% of the total,
respectively. (Nationally, Nader got 2.6% and Buchanan .44%.)
The results in Palm Beach County were quite different. Here Gore won 62.21% of
the vote (268,945) to Bush's 35.36% (152,846). Nader received 5,564 votes
(1.29%) and Pat Buchanan, 3,407 votes (.79%). With only 1,655 votes now
separating the two principal candidates in Florida and the difference between
one party winning the U.S. Presidency and the other losing it, Buchanan's vote
count seems highly significant. By my calculation, he received 132% more votes
in Palm Beach County than he won in the State overall. Looked at this another
way: Palm Beach County represented 7.24% of the State's total vote; but it
contributed 17% of the total votes received by Pat Buchanan.
There were a total of 432,286 votes cast in Palm Beach County; had Buchanan
received the same proportion of votes that he received Statewide, he would have
gotten only 1,469 votes. Put another way, it suggests that some of the
"extra" 1,938 votes that went to Buchanan might actually have been
meant for Gore. A change of only 828 votes in the Bush/Gore contest would have
reversed the result and given Gore the 25 electoral votes.
Godfrey (Jeff) Harris
Harris/Ragan Management Group
Pulbic Policy Consultants Since 1968
9200 Sunset Blvd., Suite 404
Los Angeles, CA 90069 USA
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 20:00:26 PST
From: Eric Saund <saund@parc.xerox.com>
Subject: Visual perception of document images
Controversy has arisen over a ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, that many
people have claimed is misleading and ambiguous in its design. By at least one
news report, the local election commissioner claims "There is nothing wrong
with this ballot". Clay Roberts, director of Florida Department of
Elections, is quoted to have said, "The ballot is very straightforward. You
follow the arrow, you punch the location".
I am a visual perception scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I
study visual perception of document images: How do people's brains connect the
image on their retinas to the meaning formed in their minds.
Spatial layout is critical.
In my judgement, this ballot is visually ambiguous. There are two valid ways of
parsing this image. One way is by following the arrows from candidates names to
punch holes.
The arrows are rather small and not clearly shaped, and they have little numbers
next to them that add to the visual clutter. It would be perfectly natural for
your visual system to treat the arrows as visual texture, and just filter it
out.
A second valid way of parsing this image is by reading order. When we open a
book we don't take it in all at once. We direct our attention first to the left
page, then move our eyes left to right, top to bottom. Then we look at the right
page.
It would be perfectly natural for a person to read down the left page, see the
candidate they want to vote for, then stop reading. Now they switch tasks, to
finding which hole to punch. One way of doing this is by noticing and following
the arrow. Another way is
by keeping a mental count. If you want to vote for the second entry, count down
two holes. You probably couldn't vote for the sixth ballot entry this way, but
the second, sure.
Why didn't they catch this before?
If you're inspecting the ballot to proofread it, making sure no one's name is
spelled wrong, then you might not notice the layout problem.
When you know the intent of the ballot layout, then your top-down processing can
influence your perception and resolve the ambiguity automatically so it all
looks like it makes sense. But to someone seeing this image for the first time,
in the polling booth, they have to figure it out in the moment. It takes a
different kind of looking to notice the layout problem. It's something that good
graphic designers do intuitively.
Seeing is an automatic, unconscious process. We are not aware of all the
assumptions our minds make when we view a scene.
It is perfectly plausible that a visually ambiguous ballot could get through the
inspection process. I would not fault anyone for punching the wrong hole on this
ballot. This ballot is poorly designed.
Eric Saund, Ph.D.
Xerox PARC
http://www.parc.xerox.com/saund
See the Information Design web site for subscription information.
From: Gunnar Swanson
Director, Multimedia Program
California Lutheran University
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 05:37:43 -0800
Increasing the size of the arrows might have helped but the basic problem was that two graphic statements were being made and they contradicted each other.
Statement #1 was "This arrow points to the corresponding place to punch."
Statement #2 was "This space (delineated by the rectangle implied by horizontal rules) corresponds to these places to punch."
On a ballot with one edge (instead of the "butterfly"
format) the two statements agree and amplify each other.
Although statement #1 is more coherent, statement #2 is very persuasive on the
visceral level. Merely increasing the volume on statement #1 would never negate
#2 if, as in this case, they seem to contradict each other.
From: Bruce Silver
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 11:03:12 -0600
I heard on the radio a man who said that he couldn't understand how anyone could
be confused by the ballot, and even if they were, the instructions were clear.
This assessment ignores the foundation of our written communication as
demonstrated in every newspaper, book, magazine, and form in the western world:
top to bottom, left to right. It also assumes that people will take time to read
instructions, which as technical communicators, we know is often rare,
especially on something as common and supposedly simple as voting. The lines
were long, people impatient; who among us read the directions? Didn't you just
look for your candidate and mark the closest box with an "X?"
From: Mario Sanchez
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 15:31:37 -0500
Looking at that ballot, this seems like the least likely
possibility for error. I really can't see someone counting names on the
left-hand side until they get to the one they want, then going back to the
center, starting at the top and counting down holes. Instead, I believe most
people will tend to look for the name they want, then:
a) follow the line under the candidate's name name to a hole. If this is the
case, I would expect most of the untintended Buchanan votes to come from people
intending to vote for Bush, and most of the mistaken Gore votes to go to
Socialist David Reynolds.
b) look for the hole nearest the name - obviously not very clear
on this ballot.
IMHO, (a) seems more likely than (b). I agree that the arrow should have more
clearly connected the name to the hole.
It's too late now because almost everyone in the Western world has studied the
ballot in detail, but a good test to have performed beforehand is to have a
group of people cast a vote for Bush, another group cast a vote for Gore, etc,
etc. This would be a very straight-forward test with clearly verifiable results.
Having the test performed in a noisy, rushed atmosphere would probably help too.
From: Rebecca Merck
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 17:46:24 -0500
Mario suggested a way that he perceived to be the most likely
tendency for how people will read the ballot. And when I look at it, I see a
slightly different "obvious" intent. And I think this points up
something that always surprises me when it happens, and then surprises me that
I'm surprised: People never seem to see what I think is "obvious"
about a design. Something is abundantly clear to me, so clear that I'm sure that
EVERYONE will use it the way I expect -- and then I see what they actually do
with the information, and I'm astonished.
What's obvious to me about this particular form is that the arrows should line
up perfectly with the punch-out holes. And when they didn't, and there appeared
to be two holes within the range demarked by the Gore information on the left,
I'm not sure I would have known how to mark the ballot either. And something
this important, IMO, should not be left to counting the holes and hoping you got
it right -- either the arrows should align perfectly, or the form should be
redesigned to be absolutely and utterly clear within the range of variance of
hole location that is possible in the machine.
All of this only reinforces what Mario said about testing the design of the
ballot, by testers representative of the most uneducated audience using the
ballot, and in the kind of environment in which it would be used. This is so
important in so many thing, but especially things that decide the fate of the
... well, the free world.
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 12:15:30 -0500
My understanding on this is that you receive a form as you enter the booth that you slide into the top of the device. This lines the holes in the ballot form up (or so we expect) to the information in the pages, that are turned to reveal the votes and allow you to punch out the holes correctly.
Under use, though, it appears that sliding the ballots in correctly sometimes caused the holes NOT to perfectly align with the arrows, creating a situation where instead of an arrow pointing directly to a hole, there were two holes, slightly above and slightly below the arrow. Since the arrows were no longer a primary indicator of what to punch, it seems that people believed that the separating lines above and below the candidates' names now became the indicator of what to select, and what I am beginning to believe is that people errantly interpreted this to mean that the selection of the two holes between the horizontal rules selected a single candidate, so if I want to vote for Bush, the arrow and horizontal rules tell me to punch out the TWO holes next to his name, the top two holes on the form. If I want to vote for Buchanan, I select the TWO holes next to HIS name, the second and third holes. If I want to vote for Gore, I select the two holes next to HIS name, the third and fourth.
In a situation where the form did not slide in completely, and where the arrows weren't immediately helpful in identifying the correct hole to punch, I think this is a very reasonable interpretation of the form, honestly -- and it's an error I suspect I might have made, as well.
From: James Souttar
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 15:10:23 +0000
The design of a ballot paper should be a no-brainer. You list the candidates
clearly, and against each one you put a big box for people to put their mark in.
People have done this successfully for hundreds of years, in many different
countries, without needing a masters degree in Information Architecture.
I find the problem here really revealing about the problems of information
design in general. The misconceived ballot *wasn't* created by a graphic
designer who was farting about putting gaussian blurs onto deconstructed type -
sticking up two fingers to 'usability'. It was designed by technologists so that
it could work with a computerized counting system - the usual issue of
prioritizing the requirements of machinery over the requirements of people. And
it amazes me that, even after having these kinds of technologies for so many
years, they've proved so brittle that there is still so little accommodation to
human needs. The driver here is an appetite - I'm tempted to say a greed - for
'efficiency' (meaning, of course, reduced overheads). But the casualty isn't
just the voter - it is the democratic process itself.
The real irony of this latter point is that, having been designed for mechanized
processing, the ballot forms make *manual* recounting far more difficult,
problematic and time-consuming process than it would normally be with the
conventional kind of ballot paper.
Still, on a more positive note, let's hope that this matter does go to the
courts. There are going to be few opportunities for information designers to
achieve celebrity than to be called as expert witnesses in The Democratic Party
vs The State of Florida. ;)
From: Carolyn M Bloomer, Cultural Anthropologist
Author, Principles of Visual Perception
Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota Florida
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 22:49:00 -0500
What shocked me was that when I went to cast my virtual vote for
Gore -- in spite of being aware of a problem -- I almost punched Buchanan! Why?
Visually the 2nd hole (the Buchanan hole) lies directly across from the word
DEMOCRATIC just below the top of the DEMOCRATIC box. Indeed: TWO punch-holes lie
squarely opposite the DEMOCRATIC box. The closest hole to the word DEMOCRATIC is
the Buchanan hole -- perceptually associated by proximity. Indeed the Buchanan
hole is closer to the word DEMOCRATIC than Gore's name is to the Gore hole.
Maximum confusability.
Bush supporters wouldn't be confused: Republican is at the top of the list and
therefore will naturally be perceptually associated with the top punch-hole.
Also: there is only ONE punch-hole between the top and bottom lines of the
REPUBLICAN box. Minimal confusability.
Also: as Paula Scher and others have suggested, while reading the left-hand
list, the viewer associates ALL the dots to the right with that list. It's only
when you get to the right-hand page that you realize that some of the center
holes actually belong to the other page. That's the Oh-No! moment.
This differential confusability UNQUESTIONABLY creates a perceptual/behavioral
bias in favor of the Republican vote, regardless of intentionality.
I have a PhD, good glasses, all my faculties, and am not a retiree (yet). What
about voters who are less advantaged? Less experienced in voting? More shy? And
those more easily intimidated?
From: James Souttar
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 13:59:20 +0000
Introducing machinery into the electoral process sends out some very unhappy messages about what democracy is, and should be, about. For its own health, democracy must not be seen as a merely statistical affair, where individuals are aggregated together into huge, impersonal quantities and where voting is a matter of being processed through a bureaucratic machine.
This is exactly the kind of perception that is likely to make people stay at home, feeling disempowered and disenfranchised. We should instead make every effort to present the democratic process so as to bring out the importance and equality of each and every vote - to affirm the dignity and responsibility of the voter, to celebrate democracy itself and to ensure as full a participation as possible.
Going to the polls should be a festive occasion, invested with ritual - something that we can come away from feeling good about ourselves, that we count (literally and figuratively), are involved and have exercised our civic duties. It's something we should be able to feel proud about taking our kids to, as a kind of rite of passage for them. I'd like to see all civilized nations make election day a public holiday, involving as many people as possible in the actual processes. That alone will protect us from slowly slipping into apathy, and oligarchy.
From: Conrad Taylor
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 08:12:13 +0000
This is how it looks, from the shores of Western Europe...
In Britain, voting is almost ridiculously easy. Firstly, almost every election
is single-issue, for example to choose a Member of Parliament for the
constituency in which you are registered to vote. Sometimes there are two
ballots to cast on the same election day; an example would be choosing two local
councillors plus one Member of the European Parliament.
This simplicity supports the continued use of the paper ballot sheet, on the
single side of a sheet of paper smaller than a letter. The ballot forms are
photoset and litho printed onto uncoated paper, using quite large and legible
type, generally upper-and-lower-case. When you arrive at the polling station,
you identify yourself at the desk, and the register is checked to ensure that
you are eligible to vote. (No ID is requested so one could impersonate another
voter, but `vote early and often' is not the British way...) You are handed a
blank ballot paper; if there are two ballots, there will be two sheets, each a
different colour. You go into the simple booth where there is a shelf on which
to rest; take a pencil, and put a big fat cross against the name of the
candidate for whom you wish to vote. You then go to the ballot box and slip your
completed ballot into the slit in the box. It takes about a minute at most.
At the end of the election period, the locked boxes are brought to a central
location and opened, then the vote is counted by hand. All the candidates for a
given area are usually at the counting venue. The counting goes quite quickly,
because it takes only about half a second to see which way a particular ballot
has been cast. And if a re-count is demanded, it takes no longer than the first
count.
I think that the majority of countries have a voting system which is similar to
this one. In some cases there is greater rigour in voter identification (e.g.
India's photo-card system); in many cases a party logo or symbol is used beside
the name of the candidate, so that the illiterate can still vote. In countries
with a system of proportional representation, one votes for the party and not
for a named candidate. Some systems may require registering a first, second and
third choice, on the "single transferrable vote" system.
However, on the whole, all these systems impose minimal cognitive load on the
voter, have easy-to-understand forms, and are quickly counted by hand. The
results come in quite fast and surely. Indeed, in British general elections, we
usually have a new government and new Prime Minister the very next working day.
From: Rodolfo Capeto
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 17:42:24 -0200 (EDT)
I thought you might be interested in knowing about the
Brazilian system. Voting here is now done through electronic ballot machines
(click on Urna Eletronica).
It works thus: you choose your candidate's number on a numerical pad and (in
case you've entered a correct number) the candidate's name and picture appear on
the machine's screen. After that you're asked to confirm your choice (large
green button) or to correct it (smaller orange button) in case you decide you've
made a mistake. There's also a white button, for a 'blank' vote.
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