An election’s outcome can potentially be flipped by bad ballot design – not just the misalignment of rows, but also choices as seemingly minor as the order of candidates’ names, which disproportionately favors those at the top of the ballot. Since 2000, some aspects of ballot design have improved, partly thanks to better technology and organizations like the Center for Civic Design, a not-for-profit whose goal is to “make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant”.
This problematic ballot (left) was meant to say ‘Vote for One’ in each category, but voters thought they were supposed to only select one candidate in total on the ballot. A clearer version is the Charlotte County ballot (right).
In its field guide for designing usable ballots, the center lists 10 principles for election officials. Some are fairly obvious – use clear, simple language and one sans-serif font that’s at least 12-point in size – while others are more nuanced. For example, the designers recommend against text centered on the page, which forces the eye to hunt for the following line, and against party emblems (icons, which we process 60,000 times faster than written text, should be used only to help voters navigate the ballot). Other recommendations include avoiding color when communicating important information (not all voters see color clearly).
Unfortunately, not all jurisdictions have heeded these principles. In 2018, another county in Florida, Broward, placed the Senate race at the bottom of the first column of the ballot, underneath the instructions in English, Spanish and Creole. According to Whitney Quesenbery, a co-director of the Center for Civic Design, this design probably created problems for two types of voters: “rushers” and “skippers”.