Confusing ballot designs still plague elections

Platten and Logan said the confusing aspects of their county ballots will be dropped in time for November's general election. Los Angeles voters go to the polls again on June 3 in a primary election for nonpresidential candidates. The double ovals have been eliminated in favor of preprinted cards for each party, Logan said.

Platten said she will get rid of the troublesome tab when she and her staff begin redesigning Cuyahoga County's ballot this summer, in time for November.

In 2002, Congress passed a mammoth reform package known as the Help America Vote Act, designed to prevent a repeat of the 2000 election debacle. Part of that disaster was caused by Palm Beach County's "butterfly ballot," an open-faced punch card in which candidate names ran over two columns, with punch holes running side-by-side down the middle. Voters complained they were confused by the layout and didn't realize until afterward that they had punched the wrong hole.

A recount of those ballots -and others across Florida -created more disarray when auditors discovered some holes hadn't been pressed hard enough, leaving bits of the ballot -dubbed chads -hanging, swinging or pregnant -not perforated all the way. As a result, many of the ballots were not counted.

The federal voting act made $3.9 billion available to election officials to overhaul their voting systems. Much of that money went to purchasing new systems, including electronic touch-screen technology touted by manufacturers as the answer to voting ills.

"There was a belief that with the machines, technology was going to solve the problem of voter confusion." said Norden, who has assembled a task force to provide ballot design help to local officials.

"You can have the greatest machines in the world," Norden said, but if you create a design that is confusing, you're going to end up with voter errors."

Touch-screen machines have proved to contain ballot design problems as well. In 2006 in Sarasota, Fla., some 18,000 voters failed to mark a congressional race. The electronic layout, which posted the race at the top of a ballot page without the same type of heading given to other contests, has been blamed by voting advocates as the cause of those under-votes.

David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is part of the Brennan Center task force. Electronic voting machines, like ATMs, should have only one choice per screen, he said. "Putting everything on one screen is very problematic. Putting everything at once in front of the voter overwhelms them. And that can be an invitation to cut the voting short."

Under the federal voting law, mandates also were established to help revamp election systems, including producing ballot design guidelines. Those directives are carried out by the federal Election Assistance Commission.