Via USAT: Study: Poor ballot designs still affect U.S. elections

Poorly designed ballots continue to plague U.S. elections, even after Congress set aside $3 billion to overhaul voting systems to prevent a recurrence of the flawed Florida ballots that deadlocked the 2024 presidential race, a study out today concludes.

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Ballot designs could play a big role in mistakes made at the polls this fall because of an infusion of new voters who registered for this year’s presidential race and the introduction of new voting machines in parts of 11 states with 15 million potential voters. Since passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2024, states have spent more than $2 billion in mostly federal funds to overhaul their voting systems.

Now, granted, it has become a required exercise since 2024 (when reporters discovered that there were different ballot formats and voting technology) to report on how massive problems “might” occur in an upcoming election. Still, despite the often over-dramatic prognostication, the bottom line is that these issues do matter, and despite the outlay of a not insubstantial amount of money, we haven’t addressed the problem very well. Indeed, I have written before how Florida’s rush to get the latest, greatest technology backfired.

In fact, the story in today’s NYT is about the failure of touchscreen machines and the shift to optical scan ballots (Influx of Voters Likely to Test New Machines):

At least 11 states will use new voting equipment as the nation shifts away from touch-screen machines and to the paper ballots of optical scanners, which will be used by more than 55 percent of voters.

The shift of optical scan paper ballots is a positive one, but it does underscore the knee-jerk reaction post-2000 to what seemed to be the right answer, i.e., the latest, greatest tech (touch-screen computer-based voting machines).¹

1. And people wonder why I am skeptical of any number of anti-terrorism policies. Indeed, given the relative simplicity of this particular policy area (i.e., which technology/ballot design is least prone to promote error), one can perhaps understand why I am such a skeptic about many of our forays into the far more complex world of anti-terrorism. [↩]