Tag Archives: ballot design

Alabama touts first-in-the-nation security emblem on ballots

June 25, 2025, 10:03 pmelection administration, voting technologyballot design, election securityJustin Levitt

Plenty of states use features like watermarks on most official ballot papers (sometimes with express exceptions for ballots submitted by overseas citizens and voters with disabilities), but Alabama says it’s the first with security emblems invisible to the human eye and detectable only with specialized equipment. (I guess we’re not counting Cochise’s lapsed pilot program…)

I’m not aware of a known problem with counterfeit paper ballots, though the notion has certainly featured in some past conspiracy theories. I’m all for advances in ballot design that don’t limit access. But I do wonder whether a program with security features that are specifically designed not to be visible to anyone but the government will be received by the more conspiracy-minded.

New York City’s ranked-choice primary

June 23, 2025, 12:45 pmalternative voting systems, primariesballot design, ranked-choice votingJustin Levitt

With the hotly-contested ranked choice primary in NYC on Tuesday, voters in NYC (and well beyond) are getting a lot of publicity about how ranked-choice voting works.

The New Republic offers praise for what it calls the “generally friendly, policy-focused” campaign style that the primary has engendered.

Elsewhere, Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley have a column out today about errors marking the ballot, following up on their paper here. Surveying ballots from a bunch of different jurisdiction, the paper finds that 4.8% attempts to vote for an RCV office contain an improper mark, that 90% of votes with an improper mark are nevertheless ultimately counted in the final tabulation, and that the average rejection rate in ranked choice races – while small – is still considerably higher than the rate in races without ranked choice.

Both the style of campaigning and the rate of errors in marking the ballot are factors – two among many – in assessing the desirability of a system. I’ll be interested to see if the error rate in particular is at all different in the NYC primary after the considerable wave of publicity.