xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

Florida county ballot design raises questions about Election 2000: “The result of the 2000 U.S. Presidential race was so close that some Democratic Party officials argue that one Florida county’s hard-to-use ballot may have unfairly decided the presidency. Critics argue that some voters in Palm Beach County, Fla. might have accidentally voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, when they thought they were voting for Al Gore. Gore’s name was the second name in the left column; but punching a hole in the second circle actually cast a vote for Buchanan.”

“According to several news accounts, many voters in Palm Beach, Florida, have claimed that they were confused by the ballot structure and may have inadvertently voted for Buchanan when in fact they intended to vote for Gore. The event prompted a discussion among several academic friends and colleagues about whether the results could be statistically detected, since Palm Beach county alone had the unusual ballot structure.”

“‘Information design’ is one of those subjects that causes normal people’s eyes to glaze over with boredom — except on those occasions when it changes the course of history. That is what happened, famously, in the Challenger explosion disaster — in which, as design expert Edward Tufte famously pointed out, key data was presented to decision makers in a format that failed to highlight the magnitude of risk a freezing-weather space-shuttle launch would entail. And that is what happened this week in Palm Beach County, Fla., where an apparently well-intentioned effort on the part of local officials to make their ballot more readable for elderly citizens led to voting-booth confusion that could well have tipped this squeaker election toward George W. Bush. (Florida, it seems, is ground zero for information-design catastrophes.)”

So Jakob Nielsen doesn’t use permalinks. Go figure. See the November 8, 2000 entry. “Kara Pernice Coyne, senior user experience specialist in my New York office, writes about her experience voting in the recent election: On November 7, 2000 at a poll site in New York City, a man came out of a voting booth and told a nearby volunteer, ‘I voted wrong. I accidentally voted for the wrong person for president.’ He was told that he could talk to a judge about changing his vote. But for now, the vote is counted. I could have easily made the same mistake because the voting booth is not easy to use.”

“A few Novembers ago, Harrison (a pseudonym) walked into his familiar voting place in the United States. The same old voting booths on tottering legs with scant curtains greeted him. Inside, however, was something new: a computerized voting card. With a bit of fumbling and careful reading of the directions, he figured the thing out. Cast his vote. Participated in the modern democracy. But, nationwide computer punch card tallying systems pose serious problems for fair elections.”