Counties try to work out kinks
Formats are clearer but still have problems, experts say.

By Jeff Kunerth | Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted October 23, 2004

  The flawed ballot designs and confusing voting instructions that plagued the 2000 presidential election have been largely eliminated, but deficiencies still exist, according to an analysis of the 2004 ballots by design experts.

Overall, the layouts of this year's ballots are easier to follow and the voting instructions are clearer, said Timothy Shanahan, director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"People are going to be able to access the information and not make the mistakes they made in 2000," Shanahan said. "You are going to get more valid votes this time."

But Orange County's ballot was cited as one that continues to have problems.

Changes ordered by the Florida Legislature and the state Division of Elections should drastically reduce the number of "overvotes" in which voters marked their ballots for more than one candidate in the presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

In Duval County, where the presidential candidates' names were spread over two pages in 2000, overvoting cost Al Gore 8,084 votes and George Bush 4,815 votes. In counties where the presidential candidates were broken into two columns, Gore lost 2,692 overvotes while Bush lost 2,194.

Experts said that likely won't happen this year because of requirements that all candidates for a race appear in the same column and ballots that instruct voters to "vote for one" instead of "vote for one group."

"Just that one change of not having races in multiple columns is hugely significant," Shanahan said.

Unclear, confusing

But there are still instances of ballot instructions that are unclear or confusing.

Karen Schriver, author of Dynamics in Document Design, said the instructions at the bottom of some ballots using optical-scan systems where a paper ballot is fed into a machine could contribute to unintentional "undervotes" races or referendums left blank by voters.

Instructions that say "vote both sides of ballot" could be misinterpreted to mean the left and right sides of the ballot instead of the front and the back.

"It's a very common error, not only on ballots, but also in testing, that people forget to turn the page," said Schriver, owner of KSA Document Design and Research in Pittsburgh.

Schriver lauded Flagler County's 2004 instructions, which tell voters to "turn ballot over and vote both sides of ballot."

The state corrected a similar problem of misinterpretation when it changed the instructions for write-in candidates on the 2004 ballots.

On the 2000 ballots, the words "write-in candidate" beneath the blank line caused some voters to write in the name of their candidate instead of or in addition to filling in the bubble by his or her name. In 2000, 4,880 Floridians jeopardized their vote by erroneously filling in the write-in blank.

The new instructions tell voters: "To vote for a candidate whose name is not printed on the ballot, fill in the oval, and write in the candidate's name on the blank line provided for the write-in candidate." Beneath the blank are the words "write-in."

Many of the changes on the ballots may seem insignificant, but the wire-thin 2000 election taught Florida elections officials that poorly designed ballots and ambiguous or confusing instructions amount to a de facto literacy test for voters. Those who misinterpret the ballot are disenfranchised and their votes don't count.

In Gadsden County, for example, 12.4 percent of the votes cast for president in the 2000 election were thrown out because voters made mistakes on their ballots.

"In the 2000 instructions, it said 'Vote for a pair.' You have to know something about politics to know that the governor and lieutenant governor are the pair they are talking about. That kind of confusion has been solved," Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said.

Left to counties

In the 2000 election and those that preceded it, ballot design was left to the individual counties with only suggestions from the state elections office.

"There was no uniformity on ballot design in the 2000 election. That was one of the things that contributed to the horrific errors that plagued the 2000 election," Sancho said.

Reforms after the election produced uniform ballot-design rules and voter instructions for all 67 counties but still gave individual counties leeway on how their ballots look and read.

For example, some counties such as Lafayette put the voting instructions at the top of the ballot in all capital letters. Instructions would be easier to read if they combined capital and lower-case letters like those used on Volusia County ballots.

"It's not that people can't read caps, but it's harder to read. You put a headline in caps, but not the story," Shanahan said.

Both Shanahan and Schriver applauded the rule change that moved the optical-scan bubble or arrow to the left, next to the candidate's name. They criticized the layout of the Orange County ballot, where the arrow remained on the right where it has been since the county adopted its optical-scan system in 1982.

"It's in the wrong place. You really want that marker to be right by the name," Shanahan said.

Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles said the voting-machine software is set up for the arrow to be on the right. He said it has worked fine for more than 20 years, and poll workers instruct voters on how to connect the arrow to avoid errors. Ballots that are improperly marked, he said, are rejected by the precinct voting machines and voters are given another try to get it right.

"It has not been a problem with our voters," Cowles said.

Although the state rule specifies that the optical-scan "target" should be to the left of the candidate's name, an exception was made for the machines used by Orange and four other counties where the arrow is to the right.

"That's an exception I wish they wouldn't have asked for or gotten," Shanahan said.

Tom Delattre, who participated in early voting on Friday, said he didn't find the Orange County ballot hard to understand but confessed he did study the ballot instructions this time.

"I looked at it a little closer because of all the problems. I made sure I didn't vote for the wrong person," said Delattre, 37, of Orlando.

Shanahan and Schriver also suggested that Orange County's bilingual ballot adopt a consistent format for English and Spanish instructions. Schriver said the format easiest to read and most familiar to voters would be English instructions first, followed by Spanish instructions below instead of side by side.

Schriver lauded counties that printed their ballot instructions across the top of the ballot, rather than squeezing them all into the first column.

'Hard to read'

"Jamming it into one column makes it tight and hard to read, especially for those with poor eyesight," she said.

The names of the candidates could also be larger. State rules specify that the candidates' names can be no smaller than 10-point type. That's too small, Schriver said: "Research shows that 11-point type should be the smallest size employed."

The smaller type size was adopted so that all the candidates' names could appear in one column avoiding the "caterpillar" design that had races crawling from one column to another.

But with the redesigned ballots and many counties going to longer, 17- or 18-inch ballots, there was enough room to make the candidates' names larger, the experts said.

"The fact is they have plenty of space on all these ballots to make them bigger. Every one I looked at had so much wasted space on them," Shanahan said.

Schriver noticed one change from the 2000 ballots that made the 2004 ballots less voter-friendly. Four years ago, some counties numbered the steps a voter should take in filling out the ballot. In 2004, that disappeared from the ballots. Voting instructions now appear as a list instead of step-by-step directions.

Although the 2004 presidential ballots are an improvement over the 2000 ballots, mistakes are still likely to happen, election supervisors said. No design is foolproof. And no ballot can eliminate human error.

"You still got stupid people, and you'll always have them," said Lana Morgan, Lafayette County elections supervisor. "You still have those same people who couldn't mark a ballot in 2000, and they won't mark it right in 2004."