Butterfly Ballots confuse Canadians too

Research in Alberta has implications for U.S. voting reform

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Researchers at the University of Alberta have found that ballots arranged in a manner similar to the Palm Beach County Florida ballots are confusing to voters.  Their results are published in the December 7, 2000 edition of the journal Nature. They performed two separate experiments using single-column ballots versus butterfly ballots printed with the candidates for the prime minister of Canada.  In the first experiment 324 college students voted on the day after the U.S. presidential election.  In the second experiment 116 adults voted in a mock polling station in an Edmonton Alberta shopping center.  In this second experiment the butterfly ballots were designed to exactly resemble the Palm Beach ballots (except that the names on the ballots were Canadian).  

The college students made no mistakes on their ballots, but they rated the butterfly ballots significantly more confusing than the single column ballots (p<.0001).  "Regular voters", on the other hand, did make errors on the butterfly ballots.  Voters made 4 errors (out of 53 votes) on the butterfly ballots, while no voters made errors on the single column ballots.  20% of voters who intended to vote for Chretien voted instead for Clark - whose name was in the same position as Pat Buchanan's on the Palm Beach County ballot.  This result was statistically significant (p<.02).  The authors conclude that "the butterfly ballot may cause systematic errors in voting which could case doubt on the validity of the results from Palm Beach County." (Sinclair, et. al, 2000).  They further state that "it is remarkable that biasing formats continue to be used.  Low-cost application of social science theory and methods would help to prevent such controversy in the future."

It appears that there will be no re-vote in Palm Beach County.  I do expect a re-evaluation of the election process in the United States.  Hopefully we have seen the last "butterfly ballot" cast in a presidential election.

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Reference:
Sinclair, Robert C., Mark, Melvin M., Moore, Sean E., Lavis, Carrie A., & Soldat, Alexander S. An Electoral Butterfly Effect. Nature (408) 7 December 2000 pp665-666.