Palm Beach County absentee ballot criticized

Associated Press  22 August 2004

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Critics say Palm Beach County has come up with a confusing successor to the butterfly ballot by calling on absentee voters to cast their primary votes by connecting broken arrows.

Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who brought the butterfly ballot into disrepute in the 2000 presidential election, opted for an absentee ballot design calling on people to indicate their vote by drawing a line joining two ends of an arrow.

Voters in neighboring Miami-Dade, Broward, Martin and St. Lucie counties are filling in bubbles to indicate their choices for the Aug. 31 primary. Debbie Dent, Martin County's deputy supervisor of elections, tells people with bubble ballots, "It's like filling in a Lotto card, and they get it right away."

LePore said she chose arrows after tests showed it was easier for voters. Indian River County elections supervisor Kay Klem said she went with arrows for the same reason.

"People do the crazier things when they're asked to connect the arrows," said Stephen Ansolabehere, a former director of the Voting Technology Project, a collaboration between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Elections supervisors say demand for absentee ballots is shattering records due to get-out-the-vote drives and distrust of touch-screen voting machines. Palm Beach County received 30,752 absentee requests by Friday, nearly three times the 11,472 requested before the 2000 primary.

LePore thinks she would be criticized no matter what she picked.

"If I had used circles, they'd complain about the circles," she said.

Her infamous butterfly ballot split the names of 10 presidential candidates across two facing pages, with spots in the middle to be punched by voters. The names of George W. Bush and Al Gore were on the upper left side of the ballot and Pat Buchanan's name on the upper right.

Some voters complained that they punched the card for Buchanan by mistake when they meant to vote for Gore in a race decided by 537 votes statewide. A total of 5,304 Palm Beach County ballots had marks for both Gore and Buchanan.

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