Ballot and voting technology research:
Not ready for prime time, NSF-funded study finds
By Gale Holland, ISI

Question No. 1: For 25 points, read the following passage:
"To vote for an individual candidate of another party, after blackening an oval in the Straight Party Column, blacken the oval to the left of the candidate's name. For an office where more than one candidate is to be voted for, the voter, after blackening an oval in the Straight party Column, may divide his vote by blackening the oval to the left of each candidate for whom he or she desires to vote. For that office, votes shall not be counted for candidates not individually marked."

This passage first appeared in:

1. A Federal Elections Commission pamphlet on avoiding confusing ballot instructions.
2. The Onion satirical magazine.
3. The annual Blowing Smoke award for incomprehensible bureaucratese.
4. The general election ballot of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania.

Did you choose 4.? Congratulations! And welcome to the largely uncharted waters of ballot design and voting technology research.

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Florida election officials and voters were national laughingstocks after the mad(chad?)-cap 2000 presidential election. But many researchers, including participants in a National Science Foundation Digital Government study, think the real problem is that voting technology, ballots and the people who use them have not been researched adequately. The fate of the world's most powerful democracy could rest on points as trivial as how questions like the one that opens this article are formatted.

"Many problems attributed to "voter error" or "voter stupidity" in the last presidential election may in fact be attributed to poor design of voting systems and ballots, as well as disregard for the way people process information and interact with equipment in the context of an election situation," writes Susan King Roth, Associate Professor, School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Digital Government study, headed by Paul S. Herrnson of the University of Maryland, currently is developing a framework for voting technology research. A later application will be made to fund the actual studies.

Researchers participating in a workshop this March shared white papers. Time is of the essence. Florida 2000 spurred many election jurisdictions to make snap decisions on expensive new voting machines that could last a lifetime.

Punch-cards and machine-levers are slowly being replaced by optical-scan and Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) devices, also known as touch-screens. But no one really knows how the new technologies compare to the old ones, or to each other. For example, optical-scan ballots are considered reliable. However, Orange County, Fla. collected 10,547 "spoiled" optical-scan ballots during the Nov. 7, 2000 election, King notes in her white paper.

An election official in Virginia told King of an optical-scan voter who, asked to "complete the arrow," instead sketched in his own arrowhead. Then, there's Clearfield County, where ballots were written "in language so confusing they almost defy interpretation," King says.

DREs have also proven confusing, King writes. In pre-certification testing in Virginia, "voters misread the instructions and bypassed the screen for choosing among the candidates for governor and attorney general racesÉThe biggest display on the screens was a Ôbutton' for the instruction Ônext,' and some voters pressed that before voting for governor."

The page-by-page navigation of the typical DRE ballot may confuse or flummox voters, causing them to give up before they're through their ballots. On the other hand, DREs stop people from overvoting, or selecting too many candidates. Optical-scan ballots don't do that, but poll workers could run a check and give voters a chance to finish their ballots, or not, before they leave their voting stations, writes R. Michael Alvarez, Caltech director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Development Project, and a participant in the NSF/DG study.

Alvarez recently testified in a fascinating trial that turned on a question of ballot design. In the Compton, Calif., case, a judge overturned a June 2001 mayoral runoff race on the grounds that officials had failed to assign the coveted top ballot spot to a candidate randomly, Alvarez writes. The judge's decision was thrown out, and the case is on appeal, but Alvarez thinks the underlying research on ballot placement could be much better.

In some cases, it may be not the machines but the voters who need freshening up, notes Alvarez. For the recent March primary, Los Angeles County launched a clever campaign entitled "Got Chad" to teach voters how the county's punch-card voting system worked. The campaign appeared to reduce voter error, he notes. Election workers also underwent post-Florida 200 re-education; Alvarez, who observed the election, watched them remove hanging chads before feeding ballots through the counting machines.

The researchers are in broad agreement on areas for further study, including:

1. Ease of use of different technologies.
2. Accessibility.
3. Effective communication of information on the ballot.
4. Ability of the system to reduce voter error.
5. Potential to reduce voting fall-off (undervoting).
6. Time it takes to vote.

The needs of special groups, such as the disabled, or people on the wrong side of the digital divide, should be taken into account as well, the researchers say.