Issue #203: Florida's History with bad Ballot Design
How the ballot looks can matter a great deal
We are just over two weeks away from the end of the Presidential election in America. People have already been voting across much of the nation as vote by mail and in-person early voting ramps up. Starting Monday, early voting will begin in several Florida counties. Early voting will be everywhere in the state by Saturday - and you can see the different starting dates for each county here. Already over 1,000,000 ballots of cast by mail in the sunshine state.
With the beginning of in-person early voting in Florida, I wanted to offer up a short piece on the importance of ballot design and checking your ballot. While these days Florida ballots are all paper scantrons, it was not long ago that how you voted could vary by county. Some counties have been using scantrons for decades. Others used touch-screen voting. Others used punch-card systems. All these can have effects on vote counting. Most critically, countless studies have been done to show how voting methods and ballot design can increase the like hood of mistakes by a voter. In Florida, we have a few key example of this to look at.
I’m going to keep this confined to Florida examples, but I offer up these additional resources on ballot design issues.
These reports helped inform my analysis and offer up examples from races you may have never heard of before. It is some fascinating reading - well if you are a nerd like me at least.
With that, lets dig right in to Florida’s many, many past ballot issues.
The Infamous Butterfly Ballot
If average voters knows just one example of problematic ballot design, they will instantly thinking of the Palm Beach County, Florida Presidential ballot. The often-dubbed “Butterfly Ballot” was a note-book style ballot system that can be seen below. Voters would punch-in the hole corresponding to the candidate they wanted to vote for. Stop and see if you can recognize the problem…..
If you don’t see the issue - don’t feel bad - no one in the Palm Beach elections department did either. The issue was that to many voters, they see Al Gore listed second, just below George W. Bush. However, the second hole punch was not for Gore, it was for Pat Buchanan, who was the first listed on the right side of the page. The arrows point to each hole for each name, but its also easy to see voters, amid the rush of voting, making mistakes.
And those mistakes indeed occurred, as Bat Buchanan secured 3,411 vote in Palm Beach County; three times his second best showing in Pinellas: 1,013. In neighboring Broward County, Buchanan got just 795. Buchanan got 0.76% of the vote in Palm Beach. This was not his highest % by county, as his conservatives message played well in the panhandle. However, it stands out from the surrounding counties.
The precinct results reveal just how clear the effect of the ballot was. Buchanan was was under 0.5% across much of the region, under 1% in all but two Broward County precincts. The second voters crossed into Palm, the Buchanan vote jumps.
It is still very small, don’t get me wrong, but its higher than it clearly should have been. As we all know, Al Gore officially lost Florida by 537 votes. We can absolutely talk about recount delays, the Supreme Court, the purging of black voters, the effect of Ralph Nader - but the fact is if this ballot design did not occur, Al Gore likely wins Florida regardless of everything else.
This is a well documented case. Lets look at another instance that is much less known outside of hardcore political circles.
Race Groupings Lead to Undervotes
In 2006, there were two prominent examples of ballot design leading to a large undervote in races. For a refresher, undervote is when a race is left blank. This occurs all the time in races. For example, if a city has as its Mayoral race the same day as President, the undervote there could be well over 20% - as voters are showing up for President, not a local race they might not even show up for if it was a different day.
However, sometimes undervoting is beyond the norm - something often tied to ballot design. A very famous example of this came in the race for the Florida 13th Congressional district in 2006.
The general election for the 13th district, a Republican-leaning seat, became a much closer contest than many expected. The 2006 midterm wave for Democrats saw Senator Bill Nelson secure over 60% of the vote in his re-election. He defeated Florida 13th Congresswoman Katherine Harris, the infamous Secretary of State from the 2000 election. In the Congressional contest, Republican businessman Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat Christine Jennings by just 369 votes. However, recounts and suits followed when it appeared that Sarasota County, which Jennings had won, had a 12% BLANK vote rate.
The 12% Blank rate, relative to the US Senate contest, was way out of line with the other counties in the district. Small Hardee County came next, but that was under 5% and reflected just a couple hundred votes difference. Sarasota was showing 16,000 fewer votes.
Jennings and many Democrats questioned machine errors, but the culprit turned out to the ballot design. The Sarasota ballots, touch screen machines, listed the Congressional race just above the Governor race.
This was not the case in other counties, and past results have shown that this design will cause voters to not see the other contest. Especially since the page before showed the US Senate contest by itself. Voters quickly develop a mental idea that its one race per page. A confirmation of this effect was that Sarasota’s absentee ballots, which were of course paper, only had a 3% undervote for the Congressional race. The ballot design issue very likely cost Jennings the race, as Sarasota was her best area.
There was another similar ballot undervote issue in Florida that day. However, because it affected a race not nearly as close, its often been overlooked. In this case, it was the contest for Attorney General - which was won by Republican Bill McCollum. In three counties, the Blank vote for the AG race, relative to Governor, was around 20%. After that, the undervote collapses.
Here the culprit is the same ballot design issue. As this sample from the Brennan Center of Justice report shows, the Charlotte County ballot lumped in attorney general under Governor.
Notably, as the report documents, in Sarasota, since AG was not lumped with Governor (rather Congress was) there was no major undervote issue for AG there. Races like the AG or 13th, which featured just two candidates, getting put on the same page with a multi-candidate contest, is just begging for a voter to gloss over it. The Brennan Center report didn’t have the Sumter or Lee ballot designs, but I am venturing the same issue is at play there.
In the AG case, all three counties were solidly red, meaning McCollum surely lost votes due to this error. Luckily for McCollum, he had a strong enough margin across the state to avoid the fate of Jennings in the 13th.
The 2018 Undervote in Broward County
The most recent ballot design scandal to plague Florida is one I have written about extensively. In 2018, a major ballot design error in Florida led to 25,000 fewer votes being cast for the US Senate contest between Bill Nelson and Rick Scott than were cast for Governor’s race between Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis. The 3.7% undervote in Broward was the highest in Florida by a wide margin.
The culprit was quickly determined to the Broward’s ballot design. You can see a sample ballot below - showing the Senate and Congressional races placed at the bottom left under the rules. Voters eyes, meanwhile, are drawn right to Governor sitting at the top center.
This ballot design already had warnings. The US Election Assistance Commission said such a design should never be done. The story, and the warnings against the design, were covered across national news in the days after the election.
This issue took center stage because the Senate race had Rick Scott leading Bill Nelson by right around 10,000 votes. With 25,000 missing votes in deep-blue Broward County, it was entirely possible that could make the difference.
As recounts were ongoing in 2018, I wrote a detailed numbers analysis of the Broward precinct data. My report, which includes much more details on the Broward ballot issue, concluded that Nelson could have netted right around 9,000 votes from the error.
This may have put him just shy of a victory. Of course, its possible he does 2,000 or so better, but also 2,000 or so worse. A further analysis from the MIT election lab also pointed to a similar gain for Nelson - with their analysis of the physical ballots themselves (seeing how a ballot that left Senate blank voted in the other contests) - estimating a net gain for Nelson of 9,600. He may have fallen just short regardless. That of course, does not excuse the issue itself.
The effect of the Broward ballot stands out in a statewide precinct map showing where undervotes were higher. Red indicates a Senate ballot undervote of 1% or higher.
The Broward ballot creates an undervote that begins right on the county border. The effect of the ballot is clear even more so when you factor in that dark red spot in the county’s southeast end. That group of precincts belonged to the 24th Congressional district; which was unopposed and hence no race appeared on its ballot. As a result, any voter in the 24th only had the US Senate contest in that bottom corner, and no Congressional race that might catch their eye. The effect of no Congressional race to possibly catch voter attention was a massive spike in voters missing that column altogether.
The ballot scandal, and the recount issues that followed, where the final strike for Brenda Snipes, the long scandal-prone Broward elections leader. She was suspended by Rick Scott and eventually opted to settle with the state for full retirement benefits and dropped her suit to be reinstated.
Don’t Rush as You Vote
Going through all these examples, and knowing that different jurisdictions across America will make similar mistakes - at least in a few areas - I leave you with these thoughts. When you go to vote, take your time and be diligent. Look over your ballot and make sure you know what races you should be seeing. If formatting is confusing you, ask for help or clarification. Do not presume anything if you are not 100% sure. Its not a test, its not a race, there is no time limit on you being in the booth.
Take a breath, take your time, and don’t be tricked by bad ballot design.