99% Invisible - 187- Butterfly Effects

Episode Date: November 4, 2015

Ballots are an essential component to a working democracy, yet they are rarely created (or even reviewed) by design professionals. Good ballot design is mainly a matter of following good design principles in general—familiar territory for graphic designers, but not … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. To begin, there's someone our producer Sam Greenspan would like you to meet. Can you say who you are and how you know me? I'm your grandmother. My name is Jean Greenspan and I'm Sam Greenspan's grandmother. Jean Greenspan is my father's mother. I call her Grandma Jeannie. She grew up during the Great Depression and because her family got a lot of help from FDR and the New Deal, Grandma Jeannie is a Democrat. Always has been, always will be. Grandma, have you ever voted for a Republican or anyone who wasn't a Democrat?

No, no, no, no, no, no, never, never, never do that. Always vote for a Democrat. And so on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in the year 2000, Grandma Jeannie hopped on her three wheel bike and peddled over to the community center in her retirement village and she did what she always does she voted a straight democratic ticket or at least she thought she did grandma can you tell me where you live oh now I live in century village west Palm Beach in Florida and in what county do you live in Palm Beach County an election turmoil, a presidency in the balance, who will emerge the winner in the historic Florida recount.

I believe the people of Palm Beach County have entrusted us to voice their right to participate in their government. I move that this board conduct a manual recount of all the ballots for the presidential election for the year two. The election was close, but tonight after a count and yet another manual we count, Secretary Cheney and I are honored and humbled to have won the state of Florida, which gives us the needed electoral votes to win the election. As a quick refresher, the 2000 presidential race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore came down to contested votes in Florida.

And one of the four counties at the center of the controversy was Palm Beach County. Voters were using paper ballots, where you indicate your choice by punching out holes with a metal stick. Palm Beach County's ballot, known as the Butterfly ballot, had choices of candidates spread over two pages, with the holes to punch out in between them. But some found the layout confusing. Voters who wanted to cast their vote for George W. Bush had no problem. It was clear that the correct hole to punch was the very first one, right at the top.

But there was some ambiguity about which was the right hole to punch to indicate a vote for Al Gore. Was it the second one down, right after after Bush or was it the third one down? Gore was actually the third one down. The way the ballot was set up, some voters who believed they were voting for Al Gore actually cast a vote for Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan being the extremely conservative reform party candidate. And there was also a problem with the physical ballots themselves. Namely, the Chads. When you punch a hole in something, the Chad is the little piece of paper or cardboard or whatever it is that gets punched out. And in theory, it should be completely punched

out. But sometimes it just doesn't happen. Sometimes the Chads hang on. And in the case of the 2000 election, if the Chad was still hanging on, the ballot counting machine couldn't always read the ballot. And for the people who would eventually count them by hand in the recount, the auditors had to interpret the intent of the voter, and these hanging chads became quite infamous as well, because in retabulating the vote, you had to make assumptions about whether a hanging Chad was a vote for a particular candidate or it was a mistake. That's Eric Heron. My name is Eric Heron and I'm the Aberdeley family professor of political science at West Virginia University. And I focused my research on elections, electoral systems. And so because of this faulty ballot in Palm Beach County my grandma Jeannie a died in the wool new deal Democrat from the Jewish tenements of New York

City might have accidentally endorsed a third-party candidate who embraces all the things that she is against and then when we were told I was really embarrassed we felt cheated we felt guilty I felt guilty that I voted for the wrong person. Her retirement community, Century Village, was actually called out by salon.com and other news outlets, as polling unusually high for Pat Buchanan. There's extensive research to show that the votes cast for Buchanan in Palm Beach County were extraordinarily high. They were anomalous in the region and in general, and the best explanation for the spike in support for Patrick Buchanan was the design of the ballot. Even Pat Buchanan himself admitted that his high numbers were probably due to an error.

Now, the Butterfly Ballot was only one small piece of the debacle that was the 2000 election in Florida. A lot of absentee ballots were counted incorrectly, there was a manual recount that was started and then stopped, and later it would come out that the state of Florida wrongfully denied the right to vote to at least 12,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom were people of color. All of this in an election where the margin of victory was fewer than 600 votes. There were a number of incidents in Florida in the 2000 elections that were politically charged and potentially motivated by partisan intent,

but the design of the butterfly ballot is much more likely a case of malpractice than malice. It was a classic design fail. It's a poorly designed ballot. It is a ballot that does not take into account the way that a voter would look at the ballot and use the particular technology in place at the time, punch card technology, to cast their vote.

The ballot is a designed object that is critically important for democracy. But in the United States, it's almost never designed by an actual design professional. And as such, our liberty is being infringed upon by the tyranny of bad design. One of the oldest recorded instances of a vote is from the ancient Greek play The Humanities by Eskolas. In this story, Aresti's is on trial for the murder of his mother. Twelve jurors line up and take turns placing a stone in one urn to signify guilty or in another urn to signify not guilty.

And this motif of the stone as a marker of a vote, it's an image that's stuck, and the Greek word sephos, which means small stone or pebble, is the root of syphology or the study of elections. And as Eric Heron tells it, himself a syphologist, the whole stone in the earn setup was not too different than how elections in the United States were originally conducted. So in the early US elections, you will find voters casting a voice vote. They physically had to make their way to the polling place and announce their vote. And one of the things you do sacrifices the privacy of your vote. Individuals know who you are voting for. And what that can engender is pressure on voters to support one candidate or another.

And the polls were not calm places with orderly lines. You could be bachelored and pressured into voting a certain way. Early elections in the United States often featured liquor and violence and fraud. Voters would have to push or shove or be physical to express their right to vote. In fact, an election could be so raucous that it served as an argument for some against women's suffrage. Elections were deemed as inappropriate for women to attend. Then, in the late 1800s, elections supervisors realized that having people vote by speaking their choices allowed was a terrible idea.

The lack of privacy could lead to coercion, and those who did vote their conscience had no way to verify that their vote was being recorded accurately. And this all led to the advent of the paper ballot called a ticket. But unlike the ballots we have today, these were printed not by the government, but by political parties. Political parties would print their own ballots. That voters would take with them to the polling place. Now these could be printed in newspapers,

they could be printed by the parties themselves and distributed, and the voter would turn in that party ticket. The party tickets would generally only have the candidates from that party on them. So if say you wanted mostly Republicans, you go get a Republican party ticket and then you cross out the candidates that you don't want and then either write in or literally cut and paste

pieces of paper with your candidate's names onto that ticket. And this is the origin of the term to cast a split ticket or a straight ticket. But this system also had problems. For one, parties could make tickets that looked like those of their opponents, but actually had their own candidates listed, dooping voters into voting for the wrong party. Non-standard ballots also created other opportunities for shenanigans, like racketeering schemes, which facilitated a whole black market of buying and selling votes.

And so the party ticket system wasn't creating fair elections either. So in the late 19th century, there is an innovation that is imported from abroad. It's called the Australian ballot. And the Australian ballot is government printed ballot that is distributed to voters who come to a polling place and they cast their ballot in private. And this Australian ballot system was a game changer. First of all, we started treating ballots more like currency. Administrators have to store them securely.

They have to restore them safely. They have to maintain a clear chain of custody over them to maintain the integrity of the election process. They're often printed on special paper to undermine counter-fitting or efforts to commit fraud. And with the Australian ballot as a point of departure, polling places in the US began to see new machines that interfaced with the official government printed ballots.

There were machines where you pull levers or use a metal rod to punch holes out of an optical scan ballot. Like we saw with the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida in the 2000 election. Today, there is tremendous variation in how each county conducts its elections. If you move across a county line, your polling place could use an entirely different balloting system. Because here's the really crazy thing about elections in the US.

Unlike much of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and most other industrialized democracies, the US runs its elections at a hyper-local level. Because the US decentralizes this whole process, you have a patchwork of election procedures all across the country. And it can vary at the county level, or even within some counties, as to how ballots are counted and processed. We do this because that's what the Constitution tells us to do. It says that states shall conduct elections, and the states generally delegate elections down to municipal governments.

Partly because voters have so many things to vote for that each municipal government requires its own ballot. We vote for so many public officials. Everything from President to Drain Commissioner can be on a ballot. Yeah, in Michigan, I grew up in Michigan, you can vote for County Drain Commissioner. And so given that each county is responsible for running its own elections, every county is on their own. They could hire a designer to make the ballots, they could not hire a designer to make the ballots. It all depends on what each election's official wants to do.

And that, more than malicious intent, may be how Grammar Jeannie and her ilk voted for the wrong guy in 2000. Exactly. Pap Buchanan is a religious fundamentalist kind of guy, not the sort of person that a bunch of Jewish grannies are going to be voting for. If you had tested out this ballot in the kind of pilot test or run what we call a usability test, even with just a few people, that this issue would have surfaced pretty quickly. That's Dana Chiznell. She's a user experience designer. And I do applied research about design in voting in elections.

Dana, along with her colleague Whitney Quizenberry with the Center for Civic Design, have made it their mission to bring design theory and practice to elections. In election administration, usability testing doesn't get done. Pilot testing on these kinds of designs doesn't get done. So Dana co-authored a set of field guides to ensure voter intent. Design manuals for elections officials. And the very first one in the series was how to design usable ballots. So one of our recommendations is use lower case letters, use mixed case.

Mixed case print is just easier to read than all caps. This has actually been proven in studies. We also say avoid centered type. Center type is for wedding invitations and wine labels. It really doesn't belong on a form, especially when like this. Other recommendations include using big enough type. In New York in 2012, I think they use six-point type on their ballots.

It's not uncommon to find magnifying glasses in New York voting boots. The Center for Civic Design also recommends using one sand serif font. If you look at some of these ballots, they look like ransom notes. There are lots of different type families that are used. The whole thing is just basically screaming at you. And we can calm all that down quite a bit by just going with one...

...sensor of... font. The suggestions of the guidebooks for how to design a good ballot are akin to designing a good anything. When designers get a hold of these things, they're like, This is design 101. But election officials don't know this. And election officials, unlike normal clients, often have to uphold legislation requiring them

to use bad design. If you go look at election code in practically every state, thing, design of the ballot is legislated. What the typeface is, what size it should be, what the grid is. It's like bad design is legislated. Oh yeah, almost exclusively bad design. So not only do election officials have to apply better design

principles to their ballot making, they also need to change laws. But one thing that might solve ballots for good is standardizing them. It's actually a project which Dana, Chisnell, and the Center for Civic Design are also working on. They've developed a prototype called the Anywhere Ballot.

It's a touchscreen system where you can resize text, adjust contrast, navigately, verify that you've voted for who you meant to vote for, and it's open source, so any elections official can use it. Though Dana is quick to admit that it probably won't eliminate all forms of unfairness. Oh, well something always goes wrong, I just hope that it will not be a major design disaster. The election official's prayer is, may the margins be wide.

May the margins be wide. Find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible. You must go to 99pi.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX. you