Defects by design: Ballots that fool voters
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Presentation to the Committee on Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine (NASEM) in contribution to the report Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy (2018) Updated with annotation on the ballot images.
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Defects by design: Ballots that fool voters
- 1. Defects by design | 1 Defects by design Ballots that fool voters Whitney Quesenbery Center for Civic Design @civicdesign | @whitneyq
- 2. EAC / Design for Democracy Effective Designs for the Administration of Federal Elections (2007) Better Ballots (2008), Better Design, Better Elections (2012) and Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes (2011) Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, Vol 01 Designing Usable Ballots Anywhere Ballot
- 3. A failure of intent caused by Typography Ballot layout Marking mechanisms Instructions and messages and election codes that require poor design
- 4. Election design challenges affect all facets of voting Perception Interaction Understanding and civic literacy gaps
- 5. Defects by design | 5 43% of adults in the US read at basic or below basic levels U.S. National Assessment of Adult Literacy http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp 14% 29% 44% 13% 30 Million 63 Million 95 Million 28 Million
- 6. Defects by design | 6 If you can’t read the ballot effectively, you can’t vote accurately Look at all the confusing text and graphics
- 7. Defects by design | 7 If you can’t read the ballot effectively, you can’t vote accurately Good typography can make even a rows-and- columns ballot easier to use
- 8. Defects by design | 8 If you can’t find the correct marking location, you can’t vote accurately The layout on the right makes it easier to find the correct mark. The layout on the left skips holes in unpredictable ways.
- 9. Defects by design | 9 If you don’t know how voting works, you can’t vote accurately Can you tell that you should only vote on one side of the ballot? And that your vote is not counted if you do?
- 10. Defects by design | 10 Make contest boundaries easy to see 1. A contest hidden below instructions 2. A contest hidden above another contest. Look how much clearer when it’s on its own page. 2. A New York City ballot (the have gotten a little better since this election!)
- 11. Defects by design | 11 Never - ever - split a contest across columns or pages With 34 candidates for Senate, California election officials struggled to find layouts that wouldn’t cause overvotes. See https://civicdesign.org/breaking-the-ballot/
- 12. Defects by design | 12 A consistent and unambiguous relationship between voting choice and marking mechanism When the oval or arrow or square is to the left of the name, it’s got a stronger association. Multi-column ballots make ovals on the right an even worse problem.
- 13. Defects by design | 13 A consistent and unambiguous relationship between voting choice and marking mechanism A good mitigation in a state whose election code says that the ovals must be on the right – staggering the rows.
- 14. Defects by design | 14 Give voters control of all actions that make or change a ballot selection Every ballot marking device should have a well-designed review screen. The Help America Vote Act requires that voters are warned of overvotes, but scanners don’t usually warn about undervotes.
- 15. Defects by design | 15 Don’t force voters into problem-solving Tell voters what they can do. Don’t make them do arithmetic.
- 16. Defects by design | 16 Don’t force voters into problem-solving Don’t use terms that voters won’t understand. Design messages to help voters take action to make their ballot reflect their intent.
- 17. Defects by design | 17 Clear, minimal, helpful instructions in the right place There is really nothing to say. The short clean text, good layout and visual illustration speaks for itself.
- 18. Defects by design | 18 Clear, minimal, helpful instructions in the right place Our research to design better ranked choice ballots and instructions showed that it’s the right words, not more words. https://civicdesign.org/projects/rcv/
- 19. Ballot design can help voters be successful Follow proven election design principles Meet voters' needs for easy interaction, plain language, and clear design Test with voters
- 20. Thank you Whitney Quesenbery whitneyq@civicdesign.org @whitneyq civicdesign.org @civicdesign Better Ballots research on ballots that have fooled voters in real elections https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/better-ballots
Editor's Notes
- Discuss: design defects that lead to votes not being counted and offer recommendations that might be implemented to correct for this.
- Thank all the work
- All of it. Ballots are riddled with simple basic design problems from the overall layout of the ballot to instructions. I’m not even going to talk about accessibility much, because others are going to cover that. Except to say that almost all of the problems I’m going to discuss affect people with disabilities, low literacy, low English proficiency and most of all civic literacy gaps disproportionately So they not only don’t meet all of our various laws intended to ensure equal access to the ballot, but they exacerbate the disparities. What makes this so aggravating is that the solutions we can recommend are not new and not even cutting edge design. We have known about some of the solutions for at least 17 years – but really much more. Let’s start with typography.
- U.S. National Assessment of Adult Literacy http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp Below basic – only the most simple and concrete reading skills Basic – able to manage everyday tasks Intermediate – moderately challenging activities like consulting reference material Proficient – interpreting text, comparing viewpoints Below Basic: 14% or 30 million people Basic: 29% or 63 million people Intermediate: 44% or 95 million Proficient: 13% or 28 million
- Text size – complaints galore in 2010 when NYC ballots didn’t even reach the level of the VVSG Clutter – party emblems, all capital letters, row and column identifiers, instructions in the wrong place, voting ovals to the right of names
- Our demonstration of a ballot that meets proposed Voter Friendly Ballot Act Shorter, clearer instructions at the top of the ballot where they will be read Reduced clutter leaving room for larger text Shading and lines help separate contests, even with the full face restriction Ovals to the left and immediately next to the candidate name
- 2008 testing with 100 people
- More than 14,000 missing votes for CD 13 in Sarasota County (14% of voters). Charlotte County had 2.5% residual votes Consistency, headings, one contest per page if that’s the usual standard
- Of 8.5M voters, 236K overvotes – 3% Los Angeles: 2M votes 150K overvotes – 7% Madera: 27K votes, 850 overvotes – 3% Santa Cruz: 95K votes, 985 overvotes – 1%
- Why the fetish for marking on the right, where it has an uneven relationship to the names. Single columns better!
- Ballot A – 116 errors - 9 overvotes Ballot B – 92 errors – 4 overvotes Not significant, but a clear trend, also stronger preference. 2008 testing with 100 people