Democracy Has a Layout

The answer came thirteen months after the election, in the December 2001 issue of the American Political Science Review. Six political scientists, led by Jonathan Wand, had spent the year inside the precinct returns of Palm Beach County, Florida. Their title surrendered the suspense: “The Butterfly Did It.” The butterfly ballot used in the county on November 7, 2000, had caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Pat Buchanan, the Reform Party candidate. Florida had certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes, 2,912,790 to 2,912,253. A page layout had moved nearly four times the number of votes that decided the presidency.

Palm Beach County voted on punch cards. The ten presidential candidates were printed on two facing pages, and the column of punch holes ran down the middle like a spine. George W. Bush headed the left page and matched the first hole. Pat Buchanan headed the right page and matched the second hole. Al Gore, second down the left page, matched the third. A voter who read the left column top to bottom, found Gore’s name second, and punched the second hole voted for Buchanan. The eye travels left to right. The holes run straight down.

The county’s absentee voters gave the study its control. Absentee ballots did not use the butterfly format. On election-day ballots, Buchanan’s share of the Palm Beach vote ran four times his share on absentee ballots. In every other Florida county, his election-day and absentee shares matched. Among the 3,053 American counties where Buchanan appeared on the ballot, Palm Beach produced the most anomalous excess of votes for him. Same county, same day.

The Senate race measured the mistake. Among Palm Beach voters who backed the Democratic Senate candidate, Bill Nelson, about ten of every thousand election-day voters also punched Buchanan. Among Nelson’s absentee supporters, the figure was fewer than two of every thousand. Take the absentee rate as Buchanan’s sincere support, and about 2,300 Palm Beach voters appear to have chosen him by mistake. Nearly 90 percent of those absentee Nelson voters wanted Gore for president, so at least 2,000 of the misvotes were meant for him.

Buchanan’s own campaign read the returns the same way. Two days after the election, his sister and campaign manager, Bay Buchanan, told the Los Angeles Times she was startled to hear Karl Rove claim strong Reform support in the county. The Reform campaign had bought no advertisements there and paid no visits. Buchanan received 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, 0.79 percent of its presidential vote, against 0.3 percent statewide. Richard Smith, a statistician at the University of North Carolina, later modeled the county from the other sixty-six and predicted Buchanan would draw about 371 votes there. He drew nine times that many.

The overvotes came from the same confusion. Palm Beach County threw out 19,120 presidential ballots punched for more than one candidate. An overvote cannot be recounted. It is thrown away. The Palm Beach Post examined the discards and found 5,330 voters, many in Democratic strongholds, who had punched both Gore and Buchanan, whose hole sat directly above Gore’s on the card. Some of them plainly believed that president and vice president had to be punched separately: the second hole for Gore, the third for Lieberman. The card recorded Buchanan and Gore, and the machine refused it. The Washington Post later found that the 8,000 Palm Beach voters who paired Gore with one of the minor candidates printed beside him went more than ten to one Democratic in the Senate race. Statewide, the Post counted 5,800 ballots punched for both Bush and Gore, a population ten times the certified margin. These were comprehension failures, recorded and discarded.

Theresa LePore designed the butterfly ballot. She was Palm Beach County’s elected supervisor of elections, a Democrat, and a member of a federal task force for blind and handicapped voters. She knew her elderly electorate. She enlarged the candidates’ names so older eyes could read them, and the larger type forced the ten-candidate race onto two pages. “I was trying to make the ballot so that it would be easier for the voters to read,” she told ABC News that December, “which is why we went to the two-page, now known as the butterfly ballot.” The first complaints reached her office at ten o’clock on election morning, three hours after the polls opened, from two elderly men. Two days later she told the Palm Beach Post, “Hindsight is 20-20, but I’ll never do it again.”

Instructions were printed on the card. Punch cards had served the county for years. Voters demanded a new election almost at once, and eleven groups of them sued. A circuit judge ruled on November 20, 2000, that no revote was legally possible in a presidential election. The Florida Supreme Court then held that the ballot did not depart far enough from the statute book to void the election. All of it was legal. It still cost 2,000 people their vote. Florida’s legislature answered the following spring with a reform law that retired the punch cards and began putting ballot layouts into administrative rule.

A margin of 537 votes has a hundred fathers, and serious people name the others: the felon purge and the absentee envelopes, the Nader votes and the networks. All of them belong in the record. Only one of them was printed on paper and handed to every voter in the county. Only one of them was designed.

A ballot is a sort of theatrical script. Every voter performs it alone, in a booth, in one take, with no rehearsal and no stage manager. Its stage directions are printed in agate type, five and a half points, the size newspapers reserve for stock tables and legal notices, the size chosen when no one expects the reader. Vote for one. Follow the arrow. The hand holding the pen trusts the page. When the page lies, the hand lies, and the voter goes home believing the performance succeeded.

Palm Beach gave a bad stage direction. It told the eye to travel down the left column, and it told the stylus to punch straight down, and thousands of bodies obeyed both at once. The theater gives an actor weeks of rehearsal and a stage manager with a book. The polling place gives a voter a pen. The voters performed the blocking they were given, and the blocking was wrong.

No one person designs an American ballot. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration counted roughly 8,000 local jurisdictions running American elections. In each one the ballot is laid out by an elected supervisor, a county clerk, a staff of a dozen, or a vendor’s template. States legislate the furniture. Florida’s section 101.151 awards first position in every race to the party that won the last governor’s election, which is why Bush’s name stood first in 2000: his brother had won the statehouse two years earlier. The statute fixes the order of the names and the headings of the offices. Then it falls silent about everything the eye actually meets: columns, arrows, shading, breaks.

The federal government only advises. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 created the Election Assistance Commission, and in 2005 the commission hired the design initiative Design for Democracy to draft model ballots and voter materials. The resulting handbook says on its face that compliance is voluntary, and that where the guidance conflicts with state law, the law wins. The Center for Civic Design boils the same research into pocket field guides now used in election offices across the country. Volume one covers designing usable ballots. Volume three covers testing ballots for usability, which means watching ordinary voters work the draft before it prints. The guides rest on one sentence, and it has never been made law. Thousands of votes are lost in elections every year because of poorly designed ballots.

The federal guidelines now describe the butterfly’s mistake. The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines require that a certified system be able to present a contest without splitting it across two columns or two pages. Their drafters cite strong evidence from recent elections that split contests produce overvotes and misvotes. The requirement travels with machines submitted for certification. States adopt the guidelines by choice, and no statute obliges a county to rehearse its ballot on a single voter before election day.

Florida taught the lesson more than once. Duval County lost more votes that same November: nearly 22,000 presidential ballots spoiled as overvotes, more than Palm Beach threw out, in a county where the presidential race ran onto a second page.

Sarasota County came next, in 2006. In the race for Florida’s 13th Congressional District, Republican Vern Buchanan, no relation to Pat, defeated Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes. More than 18,000 Sarasota ballots recorded no choice in that race, an undervote of 12.9 percent, while the Senate race on the same ballot drew an undervote of about 1 percent. The county had placed the two-candidate congressional race on the same touch screen as the six-candidate race for governor, and voters’ eyes went to the big race. The supervisor, Kathy Dent, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that people missed it because it was sandwiched between two big races. The newspaper’s own analysis concluded that the most important factor in the undervote was bad ballot design. Michael Herron, one of the six authors of the butterfly study, testified that with a normal undervote Jennings would have won by roughly 3,000 votes. Investigators examined the machines for more than a year and cleared them. The layout was no one’s responsibility.

Broward County repeated the mistake in 2018. The county printed its instructions in English, Spanish, and Creole down the first column. The Senate race went beneath them, at the bottom left. The governor’s race opened the second column and collected the eye. Some 30,413 Broward ballots, 4.5 percent, skipped the Senate race; in the rest of the state the skip rate was 0.7 percent. Nearly 25,000 fewer Broward votes were cast for Senate than for governor. Rick Scott beat Bill Nelson statewide by 10,033 votes. Researchers at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab priced the layout at a net loss of 9,658 votes for Nelson, which leaves Scott the winner by 375. A later study estimated roughly 25,000 excess undervotes, concentrated among the least informed voters. Florida rewrote its ballot rules the following year and standardized what Broward had improvised.

The order of the names is design too. Florida’s ballot-order statute has been measured in court. In 2019, after a federal trial in Tallahassee, Judge Mark Walker found that the candidate listed first in a Florida office block receives, on average, about five percentage points of primacy advantage. That edge is larger than the margin in much of the state’s modern history. Walker struck the governor’s-party-first statute down. The Eleventh Circuit set his order aside on standing, and the statute stands. In Florida, first position still belongs by law to whichever party last won the governor’s race.

A locked polling place leaves evidence. There are photographs, affidavits, a sheriff’s report, a plaintiff. A bad layout leaves nothing. The ballot was counted exactly as marked. The voter goes home believing she voted for the man she chose, and there is no day in court, because the injury is invisible to the injured. The harm surfaces a year later, as a regression in a journal, as a number in a model. Bad design disenfranchises as surely as a locked door. It is only more polite about it.

No official sets out to confuse anyone. Theresa LePore was trying to help old people read. The injuries fall on the predictable: the elderly voter and the first-time voter, the second-language reader and the worker racing a shift. Every one of them goes home believing the vote counted.

The voter blames herself. Some voters knew at once, and they were the lucky ones. The rest never knew. A voter who caught the mistake at the booth could ask for another card. Once the card was cast, there was nothing to ask for. Shame does not sue. A locked door produces a plaintiff. A bad ballot produces an apology muttered to a poll worker. The poll worker cannot give the vote back.

The midterms fall on Tuesday, November 3. The ballots for that day are being laid out now, in the few crowded weeks between the close of candidate filing and the deadline to mail ballots overseas, by clerks working against printers’ deadlines and vendors’ templates. The sample ballots will run in the newspaper and sit on the county’s website, mostly unread. The fixes are known, and they are cheap. Put the instructions where the eye starts, and keep every contest in a single column. Test the draft on a dozen voters before it prints, and fix what makes them stumble. No statute from Washington requires any of it.

Twenty-six years have passed since that election. The instrument is the same instrument. A presidency once fit inside the distance between a name and a hole. More than 2,000 Palm Beach County voters punched Pat Buchanan’s hole by mistake, and most of them went home believing they had voted for Al Gore. No recount could reach them, because the paper recorded the hand rather than the intention. On the first Tuesday of November, tens of millions of hands will trust the column break and the arrow. Somebody arranges that page. Democracy has a layout.