A ‘butterfly ballot’ with misaligned rows featured in the 2000 election in Florida but even the order of candidates’ names can influence voters’ actions

Though Florida had a host of problems during the 2000 presidential election, one of the most obvious was the “butterfly ballot” used in Palm Beach county, Florida. On that ballot, the space that voters pressed to mark their choices was misaligned with the row of the given candidate, causing some to accidentally vote for the wrong candidate. In fact, after George Bush was declared the winner of the state, by a 537-vote margin, the Palm Beach Post determined that the ballot design ultimately cost Al Gore the presidency.

An election’s outcome can potentially be flipped by bad ballot design – not just the misalignment of rows, but also choices as seemingly minor as the order of candidates’ names, which disproportionately favors those at the top of the ballot. Since 2000, some aspects of ballot design have improved, partly thanks to better technology and organizations like the Center for Civic Design, a not-for-profit whose goal is to “make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant”.

Sarasota vs charlotte This problematic ballot (left) was meant to say ‘Vote for One’ in each category, but voters thought they were supposed to only select one candidate in total on the ballot. A clearer version is the Charlotte County ballot (right).

In its field guide for designing usable ballots, the center lists 10 principles for election officials. Some are fairly obvious – use clear, simple language and one sans-serif font that’s at least 12-point in size – while others are more nuanced. For example, the designers recommend against text centered on the page, which forces the eye to hunt for the following line, and against party emblems (icons, which we process 60,000 times faster than written text, should be used only to help voters navigate the ballot). Other recommendations include avoiding color when communicating important information (not all voters see color clearly).

Unfortunately, not all jurisdictions have heeded these principles. In 2018, another county in Florida, Broward, placed the Senate race at the bottom of the first column of the ballot, underneath the instructions in English, Spanish and Creole. According to Whitney Quesenbery, a co-director of the Center for Civic Design, this design probably created problems for two types of voters: “rushers” and “skippers”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 2018 Broward county, Florida, election ballot. Illustration: Guardian Design/The Guardian

Rushers are experienced voters who don’t feel the need to read instructions and would probably have skimmed over the entire first column. Skippers, on the other hand, are low-literacy readers. “They tend to start a paragraph, decide if they need to read it, and then skip on,” says Quesenbery. “They, too, can miss information on ballots if they skip to the next page, column or section.”

It’s not uncommon for voters to leave certain races blank, but 9% of voters didn’t weigh in on the Senate race in part of Broward county, a much higher rate than in other counties of the same congressional district that used different ballots. In total, the faulty design could have cost the Democratic candidate thousands of votes.

“That’s the worst combination,” says Larry Norden, the director of the Election Reform Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, non-partisan law and policy organization. “When you see a mistake like that, and it actually potentially changes the outcome of the election.”

After the controversy, Broward’s supervisor of elections resigned, and her replacement is currently sending this year’s ballot design to the county commissioners, the canvassing board and representatives from the political parties for review and approval, according to Steve Vancor, the county’s spokesman. The county may also conduct usability tests with prospective voters, as a ballot is only effective if it’s tailor-made for its community.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A proposal to simplify ballot design is to color-coordinate the mail envelopes used to send in ballots. Photograph: The Guardian

For example, since 1939, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has used ranked-choice voting (RCV), a system in which voters rank a slate of candidates, and if none of them wins outright in the first round of tabulations, the contender in last place is eliminated, and her votes are distributed to her voters’ second choices.

Critics often complain that such a system confuses voters, but in 2017, the majority of voters ranked at least three candidates of the 26. Recently, the Cambridge Board of Elections Commission voted to limit the ranked choices to 15 candidates. It’s a significant reduction, but a number that high would still probably be inappropriate for another jurisdiction, like San Francisco, where RCV is still relatively new. For that reason, effective ballot design is especially crucial.

Previously, the ballot in San Francisco used a “column style”, which listed every candidate’s name under headers for their first choice, second choice and so on.

According to Chris Hughes, the Policy Director and Counsel for the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, this layout incorrectly suggested that the more times you ticked their box, the more support they’d get. But, he says, “If you rank someone multiple times, your vote is still only going to count for them once.”

Eventually, the city responded by introducing a grid system, the mechanisms of RCV become clearer.

San Francisco ranked choice voting Two approaches for ranked-choice voting: column-style and grid system

The need for intelligent design is even higher for provisional ballots, which are given to voters whose registration is in question in several states. If a voter misses a field or makes a mistake, like writing the date instead of her birthday, she can invalidate the ballot, so having clear instructions and sufficient white space is crucial.

However, there’s only so much innovation that a paper ballot can support – and only so many voters it can accommodate. For those reasons, Drew Davies, the former national president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the professional association for design, prefers a digital interface called a ballot-marking device.

When used for RCV, these ballots can eliminate a chosen candidate’s name as the voter progresses, preventing them from choosing the same name multiple times. More broadly, though, voting on a screen is accessible in ways that filling out traditional ballots is not. “You can imagine that process is significantly difficult if you’re blind or if you have some motor skills issues or if you don’t have use of your arms at all,” says Davies.

The ideal design for a ballot is often impeded by other factors, like cost, space constraints, technical limitations and state law. Recently, New York passed the “Voter Friendly Ballot Act”, which includes requirements to notify voters when a ballot is double-sided and to post sample ballots online before an election. Though these changes seem obvious, it’s often necessary to spell them out explicitly. Otherwise, the consequences can be severe.

“A nightmare scenario is a close 2020 election where something like what happened in Broward county has an impact again,” says Norden.