Ballot Design Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Ballot Design Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Ballot design generally refers to the ways in which candidates and contests are arranged on electoral ballots of various types. Ballot design first received widespread attention in 2000, when the U.S. presidential election was decided in part by contested results in a county that used a butterfly ballot of allegedly poor design. Two groups in the United States that have paid particular attention to ballot design are Design for Democracy (an initiative of AIGA, the professional association for design) and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. On an international level, the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network (www.aceproject.org), begun in 1998, seeks to expand transparency of elections and increase trust in their credibility. Affiliated with the United Nations and the International Institute for Democracy and Elections Assistance, the ACE Project compiles information about election processes and tries to identify best practices.

U.S.-style democracies may be more susceptible to ballot design issues for a variety of reasons. Responsibility for ballot design is usually not centralized and is often assigned to partisan officials who lack design expertise. Further, frequent changes in election regulations and technology create opportunities for new mistakes in design.

Ballot Design Issues In The United States

In the United States, voters elect officeholders from the president to the county coroner, and may vote also in contests tied to their residence in school or water districts that cross various jurisdictional lines. Ballot challenges may make ballot design a moving target until shortly before election day. Further, ballots must be adjusted for each new election, which will have different categories of contests, numbers of contestants, and ballot styles. Best practices in design recommend that ballots be tested with users before elections, but timing considerations may make testing difficult.

Ballot design may affect electoral results in two ways. First, design flaws can mislead voters and cause them to miscast votes or fail to cast votes in certain contests. Second, every choice mechanism, even if perfectly designed, favors one choice over another. As Thaler and Sunstein (2008) have noted, there is no such thing as a neutral choice mechanism. The consequences of this reality are often called primacy effect or position bias, but perhaps a better term is position impact, because any effect on the vote is not necessarily the result of conscious or unconscious prejudice.

Design Flaws

Design flaws may lead voters to skip a contest or to vote for the wrong candidate. In a 2006 congressional contest in Florida, ballot designers placed the two-candidate congressional race on the same screen as a six-candidate gubernatorial contest. Nordenetal. (2008) reported that 13.9 percent of the voters did not vote in the contest, compared to only 2.5 percent of voters who voted in the same contest on different ballots. Similarly, many King County, Washington, voters skipped a 2009 referendum contest that appeared at the bottom of a column of voting instructions.

A ballot that requires voters to behave in a counterintuitive way may mislead voters, despite the presence of accurate instructions. Most voters obey their intuitive, “automatic systems” instead of reading directions. This kind of problem can be exacerbated by overly complex voting technologies such as punch-card ballots. The most infamous example of this kind of problem is the so-called butterfly ballot, which was used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000.

Position Impact

It is axiomatic that for every contest on ever y ballot, one candidate’s name— usually the top name on the list—will be the first name that the voter sees. Scholar s theorize that seeing a candidate’s name first may cause a voter to think of that candidate in a more positive light or to make that candidate the standard against which all others are judged. Krosnick and others (2004) have argued that this effect can swing as much as 3 percent of the vote. Whether or not this psychological effect exists, it is a physical reality that on some ballots, the names of certain candidates will be in more conspicuous positions than the names of others.

Despite controversy as to the existence and effect of position impact, ballot regulations seem to take it into account. In some states, the law requires that candidate names rotate from precinct to precinct or district to district, so that each candidate’s name appears in each position on approximately the same number of ballots. In other states, in contrast, the ballot rules seem to ensure that any possible position impact benefits the two dominant parties. In these states, candidates of lesser-known parties may be symbolically and literally moved to the fringe of the ballot. Voters who are distracted from or who cannot find their original choice may vote for a different candidate or not vote in a particular contest at all.

Position impact is less likely to affect a voter in a presidential election or other significant contest. But when voters reach the less-significant, or down ticket, contests, they may be unwilling to expend the time and energy needed to give all candidates equal consideration, or to search diligently for the candidate they had originally planned to select. These voters consciously choose the candidates they select—or consciously choose not to vote in a particular contest—but that conscious choice may have been influenced by the positions of the various candidates in the contest. Because small differences can change the outcome of an election, position impact has almost certainly affected the results of some elections.

International Ballot Design Issues

Ballot design varies from country to country and from electoral system to electoral system. In some parliamentary elections, a ballot paper may be a single preprinted sheet on which the voter selects the party of choice; in others, the voter casts two votes: one for a particular candidate, and one for the preferred party. In countries with lower literacy rates, elections officials may use pictures of candidates or party symbols to help make it easier for voters to identify their choices.

Andrew Reynolds and Marco Steenbergen (2006) report that Latin American countries tend to include symbols, colors, and photographs on their ballots and that party and candidate symbols may be found on ballots in southern Europe and in former British colonies of Asia and the Caribbean. They argue that seemingly innocuous symbols assigned to candidates can have a direct impact on voters. They report that in Tanzanian elections, candidates who were randomly assigned the symbol of a gardening hoe seemed to receive a significant benefit compared to candidates who were randomly assigned the symbol of a Western-style house. Some theorize that anti-Western, proagrarian attitudes aided the “hoe” candidates and hurt the “house” candidates. Eventually, the symbols were abandoned after allegations that the house symbol was being deliberately assigned to candidates of the nonruling party.

Possible Solutions

Design for Democracy, the Brennan Center, the ACE Project, and others have recommended best practices to avoid design flaws, including reducing visual clutter, using plain language in voting instructions, and following design principles that recognize how voters intuitively move through documents. For example, electronic ballots should include only one contest on each computer screen. On a paper ballot, candidates in a single contest should be listed in a single column. The ACE Project specifically recommends using party symbols in all environments and using photographs on ballots in societies with lower literacy rates and where party affiliations frequently change. Most importantly, best practices include conducting usability testing to verify the effectiveness of the ballot design. Rotation of candidate names, while not yet widely recommended, can help to mitigate position impact, as well as the impact of some design flaws.

Perfect ballots cannot be guaranteed, but elections officials who follow best practices can greatly reduce the number of design flaws and increase the effectiveness of and confidence in voting systems.

Bibliography:

Alvarez, R. Michael, Betsy Sinclair, and Richard L. Hasen.“How Much Is Enough? The ‘Ballot Order Effect’ and the Use of Social Science Research in Election Law Disputes.” Election Law Journal 5, no. 1 (2006): 40–56.
Bain, Henry M., and Donald S. Hecock. Ballot Position and Voter Choice. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1957.
Brady, Henry E., Michael C. Herron,Walter R. Mebane Jr., Jasjeet Singh Sekhon, Kenneth W. Shotts, and Jonathan Wand. “‘Law and Data’:The Butterfly Ballot Episode.” PS: Political Science and Politics 34 (March 2001): 59–69, www.jstor.org/stable/1350311.
Brockington, David. “A Low Information Theory of Ballot Position Effect.” Political Behavior 25 (March 2003): 1–27, jstor.org/stable/3657312.
Bullock, Charles S., III, and Richard E. Dunn. “Election Roll-off: A Test of Three Explanations.” Urban Affairs Review 32, no. 1 (1996): 71–86, http://uar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/1/71. California Electrical Code, sec, 13112(a) (2003).
Garber, Andrew. “Thousands of King County Voters Apparently Missed I-1033 on the Ballot.” Seattle Times, November 4, 2009.
Herrnson, Paul S., Richard G. Niemi, Michael J. Hanmer, Benjamin B. Bederson, and Frederick C. Conrad. Voting Technology:The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2008.
Ho, Daniel E., and Kosuke Imai. “Shaken, Not Stirred: Evidence on Ballot Order Effects from the California Alphabet Lottery, 1978–2002.” Harvard Law School Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series, Paper No. 89; Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs, Paper No. 04–001, http://ssrn.com/abstract=496863.
Krosnick, Jon A., Joanne M. Miller, and Michael P.Tichy. “An Unrecognized Need for Ballot Reform:The Effects of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes.” In Rethinking the Vote:The Politics and Prospects of American Election Reform, edited by Ann N. Krigler, Marion R. Just, and Edward J. McCaffery, 51–74. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Laskowski, Sharon J., Marguerite Autry, John Cugini,William Killam, and James Yen. Improving the Usability and Accessibility of Voting Systems and Products. Special Publication 500–256.Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Standards & Technology, 2004.
Lausen, Marcia. Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Miller, Joanne M., and Jon A. Krosnick.“The Impact of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes.” Public Opinion Quarterly 62 (1998): 291–330.
Norden, Lawrence, David Kimball,Whitney Quesenbery, and Margaret Chen. Better Ballots. New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2008, brennancenter.org/content/resource/better_ballots. Ohio Const. art.V, § 2a. Ohio Revised Code, sec. 3505.03.
Reynolds, Andrew, and Marco Steenbergen. “How the World Votes: The Political Consequences of Ballot Design, Innovation, and Manipulation.” Electoral Studies 25, no. 3 (September 2006): 570–598.
Roth, Susan King. “Disenfranchised by Design:Voting Systems and the Election Process.” Information Design Journal 9, no. 1 (1998): 1–8.
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health,Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2008.