I know it’s hard to fire people who work for the government and all, but why does Teresa LePore still have a job?
Palm Beach County has introduced an absentee ballot that requires voters to indicate their choices by connecting broken arrows, sparking criticism that it is even more confusing than the infamous “butterfly ballot” used in the 2000 election.
Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who approved the 2000 butterfly ballot, opted for a ballot design for the Aug. 31 primary that asks voters to draw lines joining two ends of an arrow. LePore said she selected the ballot after tests showed it was easier for voters.
Jesse at pandagon has more.
{ 13 comments }
schwa 08.23.04 at 9:22 am
I’ve gotta go with Jesse’s commenters on this: this is an incredibly common form of optical-scan ballot, used all over the shop for some years with no significant problems.
The real problem is the fetish for machine-readable ballots, pure and simple. If US election authorities would just suck it up and switch to hand-counting, all of these problems would disappear.
bad Jim 08.23.04 at 10:23 am
The American problem with hand counting is the number of issues on the ballot in a major election. This year in California we have to vote for president, senator, congressman, state assemblyman, city council at least; possibly also judges, board of education, local college administrators or water district, and so forth. Not to mention various propositions, referenda and initiatives.
We’re also multilingual, so the ballots have to be available in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and I don’t know what else.
Counting them by hand would be a tedious, error-prone process and has generally not been done hereabouts for a few dogs’ ages. What we have instead has been an ongoing disaster, continual embarrassment, yet largely untainted by scandal.
A good electronic voting method would be a godsend. No god so far has provided us with anything like it, of course, and though we’ve been through two elections with electronic doohickeys I think the courts have found them wanting and we’ll do the next election with optical scan.
What most impresses me about the debate over voting messages is the absence of commentary from the quality control exponents, ISO 9000, five 9’s types. There is no commitment to a verifiable, repeatable process.
In every election one or more precincts should be subject to a recount merely to determine the error rate. The higher the error rate, the wider the auditing.
bad Jim 08.23.04 at 10:29 am
voting messages? What have I been drinking? (Baron Herzog Zinfandel, $8.99 at Trader Joe’s)
voting methods
Note also that “optical scan” refers to paper ballots.
Robin Green 08.23.04 at 12:58 pm
What most impresses me about the debate over voting messages is the absence of commentary from the quality control exponents, ISO 9000, five 9’s types.
That rather confirms my view that ISO 9000 is more about marketing and generating make-work for expensive consultants, than it is about an actual concern for quality.
chris 08.23.04 at 1:13 pm
An ISO 9000 spec could say that the electoral doohickey had to reflect the intention of voters to a probability of 0.1 and if it did that, it would be 9000 compliant.
Good innit?
paperwight 08.23.04 at 4:36 pm
I think this is the same kind of ballot they use here in San Francisco. It’s dead easy. There’s a BOLD broken arrow about half an inch (1 cm+) long next to each choice, and you just color in the broken bit next to the choice you want. No harder than (actually, much easier than) filling-in-the-bubble. I proctored 2 elections last year and we didn’t have any trouble explaining it (generally didn’t have to), even to some quite elderly and one slightly developmentally delayed voter.
I’ve used poke-out-the-chad absentee ballots, and they’re a royal pain.
The optical scan machines are really good, IMO — allow for immediate feedback, create a paper trail, and would be damn hard to tamper with.
Mary 08.23.04 at 6:32 pm
The paper ballot with the checkbox, counted by hand, works just fine in Canadian federal elections, but we also used the connect the arrows optical scan ballots in Toronto municipal elections with no apparent problem. We got the advantage of fast counting and a reliable paper copy on hand for any required recount.
Or were the two arrows really broken up and on different lines? Yeah, that could be confusing.
Njorl 08.23.04 at 9:02 pm
Next election, in heavily Democratic Florida counties, voters will need to compose an original Haiku for each candidate they vote for.
Njorl
aphrael 08.23.04 at 9:30 pm
This is a standard form factor for the optical scan ballot. I find it less intuitive than the fill-in-the-bubble variety, but i’m told it’s easier for people with unsteady hands to mark correctly.
I really don’t see the problem here. It’s a new system, so the poll workers should be trained on how to demonstrate to the voters the way to sue the new system, and they should have lots of demonstration ballots on hand, but really … it’s an easy-to-use system that, if people can’t figure it out, it’s because the election staff is incompetent, not because the voting system sucks.
Matt Weiner 08.23.04 at 10:59 pm
the poll workers should be trained on how to demonstrate to the voters the way to sue the new system
Nah, the campaigns will be doing a good job of that. (Yes, yes, typo-mongering is the lowest form of blogcommentary….)
Dlanod 08.23.04 at 11:01 pm
This is an easy to use optical scan ballot. The beauty of it is if you try to connect arrows from different lines or connect multiple lines for one race the scanner beeps and spits the ballot back out at you.
It also provides a easy to read and hand tally paper trail.
Everyone should be using this style.
aphrael 08.24.04 at 12:20 am
Mat – oops. :) The point still holds, though; if voters can’t figure out how to use the new ballots, it’s the fault of the people who are supposed to teach them, NOT the ballot design. The ballot design is standard.
Jim Miller 08.24.04 at 12:36 am
In answer to your question, Teresa LePore was elected to her position — as a Democrat.
After Democrats urged her to cheat in 2000 recount, she switched to calling herself an independent, at least temporarily. (Although I don’t believe she cheated, the results of the first recount in Palm beach produced implausible gains for Gore.)
Those even moderately familiar with Florida elections can tell you that fraud and incompetence are most often found in the counties controlled by Democrats. Try a search on Broward for some recent examples.
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