Attn: Political, editorial page editors
For decades, there was a bias in the Indiana Legislature. A majority of the state’s lawmakers had last names that began with the letters A or B or C, and a paucity of lawmakers whose last names began with letters farther down the alphabet.
The reason? Candidates were listed in alphabetical order on the ballots that were used in their elections. Those at the top of the list tended to fare better with voters who possessed little or no knowledge about the candidates they were voting into office. The candidates who lost (might we call them alphabet-challenged?), tended to appear farther down the ballot.
Today, some (but apparently not all) Indiana counties use lotteries to determine where a candidate’s name will appear on a ballot. A review of the current Indiana General Assembly bears this out: there are 33 lawmakers whose last names begin with A, B, C or D and 67 members who are scattered through the rest of the alphabet. Possibly, it indicates that 33% of all Americans have last names that begin with A, B, C or D; or it could mean that not all Indiana counties are quite ready for reform.
This fact about past Indiana elections was recalled by last week’s release of a Brennan Center for Justice report that highlights ballot design flaws that can–and sometimes do–wreck a candidate’s prospects for winning an election. The report’s purpose was to point out that carelessly designed ballots have already resulted in hundreds of thousands of uncounted or improperty counted ballots. But the lesson from Indiana is that it isn’t always a matter of carelessness.
The report, entitled Better Ballots, highlights 13 design practices that can confuse voters and result in miscast or uncountable ballots. More cynically, the report might also be seen as an instruction manual that might be entitled How to Throw an Election.
The Brennan Center is no stranger to election reform controversy. The New York University School of Law-based advocacy organization lobbied strenuously for enactment of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (also known as the McCain-Feingold law) using a bogus study of political television commercials. [For more information about the Brennan-funded study, see pages 639-696 in the opinion that was written by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in McConnell vs. FEC.]
In a press release that announced its newest study, the Brennan Center claims that “design flaws resulted in hundreds of thousands of lost votes in recent elections, and the same error-causing designs still plague ballots across the country.”
The claim that “hundreds of thousands” of ballots were lost or miscounted in “recent elections” is especially troublesome. As the report points out, new voting systems have been installed since 2006 in several dozen counties having a total of 15.2 million registered voters which got their first use in this year’s presidential primary elections. Some counties with new voting equipment are in states (notably Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana) where Sen. Hillary Clinton scored late season victories over Barack Obama.
With less than 100 days left to the general election, the Brennan Center said there is sufficient time remaining for states and counties to make improvements in their ballot designs.
The report necessarily recalls the infamous “butterfly ballot” that led 2,000 confused voters in Palm Beach County, Fla., to cast their ballots for Pat Buchanan, and another 20,000 voters to invalidate their ballots by voting for two candidates, thus enabling George Bush to win Florida’s election by less than 600 votes and awarding him the last electoral college votes he needed to win the 2000 presidential election. The debacle led Congress to enact a multi-billion dollar program to replace outmoded election equipment with more modern devices.
“Ironically, eight years after the 2000 election and billions of dollars spent on new voting technology, the problems caused by poor ballot design have not been fully and effectively addressed on a national level,” the Brennan Center said in its report.
It added: “When it comes to ensuring that votes are accurately recorded and tallied, there is a respectable argument that poor ballot design and confusing instructions have resulted in far more lost votes than software glitches, programming errors, or machine breakdowns.”
–Edward Zuckerman
