Study: Poor ballot designs still affect U.S. elections

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-07-20-ballots_N.htm

Study: Poor ballot designs still affect U.S. elections
By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY


WASHINGTON — Poorly designed ballots continue to plague U.S. elections, even after Congress set aside $3 billion to overhaul voting systems to prevent a recurrence of the flawed Florida ballots that deadlocked the 2000 presidential race, a study out today concludes.

Problems with confusing paper ballots in 2002, absentee ballots in 2004 and touch-screen ballots in 2006 led thousands of voters to skip over key races or make mistakes that invalidated their votes, according to the study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

"In the big election meltdowns … where thousands of votes were lost, ballot design was the primary cause," says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

BETTER BALLOT: Varied ballot designs are 'literacy test for voters'

Ballot designs could play a big role in mistakes made at the polls this fall because of an infusion of new voters who registered for this year's presidential race and the introduction of new voting machines in parts of 11 states with 15 million potential voters. Since passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002, states have spent more than $2 billion in mostly federal funds to overhaul their voting systems.

Congress approved spending of up to $3 billion because of problems in the 2000 presidential race in Florida. A deciding factor in that race was the confusion caused in Palm Beach County by the "butterfly ballot," which required voters to punch a hole beside their candidate's name in a strip between two facing pages that listed the presidential contenders.

Despite all the spending since then, mostly on new electronic voting systems, not enough attention has been paid to ballot design, the new study warns. "There has not been a documented instance where a computer has fouled up the vote by itself," agrees Kimball Brace of the consulting firm Election Data Services.

The study's conclusion, endorsed by many federal and state election overseers, is leading counties and election system manufacturers to improve ballot designs by the November election.

Starting this week in Ohio, ballot design experts will show officials how to avoid the kind of voter confusion in Florida's 13th Congressional District in 2006. More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters skipped that race, which appeared above a more prominently displayed race for governor on the same screen. Republican Vern Buchanan won the congressional race by 369 votes.

Is it just me or is this article a thinly-veiled promo for electronic voting?

doesn't help electronic voting at all.

'the vote by itself'?

Yes, that line stood out to me, too.

across the country who witnessed 'vote flipping' when using electronic voting machines.

there *isn't* a single documented instance where *any* computer has fouled up by itself - *people* *use* computers to foul up, whether intentionally or unintentionally. To err is human - to really foul things up requires a human using (or misusing) a computer....! ;)

See for yourself how the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, the state that decided the election, was rigged in hundreds of different ways, and how the 2008 election may be stolen. Richard Hayes Phillips, author of “Witness to a Crime: A Citizens' Audit of an American Election”, will present a slide show of irrefutable evidence and sign his new book on Sunday evening, July 20th, 7:00 pm at the Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse in downtown Ukiah.

Mr. Phillips is the foremost expert on the fraudulent 2004 presidential election in Ohio. His work was relied upon by John Conyers in challenging the Ohio electors in Congress, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his landmark article for Rolling Stone magazine, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?”, and by Algenon L. Marbley in issuing his federal court order protecting the ballots from destruction. He has twice been recognized as an expert witness in state and federal proceedings as an election fraud investigator.

Assisted by others who compiled the data into tables and spreadsheets, Phillips wrote and submitted 21 papers to the Ohio Supreme Court as an expert witness in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit. He spearheaded an effort by citizen volunteers, equipped with digital cameras, that amassed some 30,000 photographs - actual ballots, poll books, voter signature books, ballot accounting charts, and other elections records - that are forensic evidence from the election and that document voter suppression, ballot tampering, ballot alteration, ballot substitution, ballot box stuffing, miscounting of votes, tabulator rigging, secret vote counting, and destruction of evidence. 1,200 of these images are included on a CD that accompanies his book, and many of these will be shown at the presentation.

The Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse is at 107 S. Oak St., at the corner of Church St. Sponsored by the Ukiah Valley Chapter of The Alliance for Democracy. Admission is $10.

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I concluded that it is an open secret that many of Ohio's elections are fraudulent, yet there are some counties that have honest elections in Ohio.

It's similar to a local giving directions, "turn right, turn left, you can't miss it." Sure, since you've got the mental picture and it clicks. Designing a ballot is often the responsibility of one person and the layout fits his/her eye, making perfect sense, even if it's flawed.

If you lay it out sensibly on paper it may differ from planned on a computer screen. Here in Las Vegas I remember many examples of exactly the same layout and number of races on screen after screen, then suddenly it switches without warning.

I remember pre-election '04 the Kerry camp bragged about the dozens of lawyers it had lined up, in case of post-election battles. What a waste, I thought. The change of overturning is next to nil. Far more sensible to prioritize manpower ahead of time, to check basic aspects like this. It would likely have saved a House seat two years later.

That too should be a matter of course before entering an election.

Of course an audit would catch a problem with the BDF, but not with the design of the ballot.