Re: Palm Beach County voting

[Bob Hoffmann <escape@alt-escape.com>]

At 03:21 PM 11/10/2000 -0800, Brian Dennis wrote:
>Analyses of the voting patterns in Florida leave little doubt that the
>Palm Beach County, FL, were not "real" (that is, reflecting the voter's
>preferences), but were rather an artifact of the flawed ballot
>design.  See:
>
>http://madison.hss.cmu.edu
>
>http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~cfox/Bio/election2000note.pdf

Fascinating.  I found worthy of quoting to the list the first paragraph of 
the second link (with attribution).  This addresses the quality of the 
ballot design (already a topic on this list), although not yet discussed so 
explicitly in this forum.

Craig R. Fox
Associate Professor of Management
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University Box 90120
Durham, NC 27708-0120
cfox@mail.duke.edu
CURRENT DRAFT, 11/10/00, 5 pm, EDT
Thanks to Bob Nau, Greg Fischer and Patty Linville and various readers for 
useful comments and suggestions.
....Apparently, a number of people have complained that the format of the 
ballot was misleading and that they may have inadvertently voted for Pat 
Buchanan whereas they intended to vote for Al Gore (see, e.g., 
www.nytimes.com; for a list of specific news articles, see 
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/florida.html). A careful 
examination of the ballot makes such an assertion quite plausible (see 
Figure 1). Contrary to Florida state law—which requires that the ballot be 
laid out so that voters indicate their choice by placing a mark to the 
right of the desired candidate—the candidate names were arrayed to the left 
and right of a center row in which voters were to specify their preference 
(the so-called “butterfly” format). Researchers have previously documented 
that such noncompatibility between input and output increases effort and 
error (Fitts & Seeger, 1953; Wickens, 1984). In the case of the Palm Beach 
ballot, the left-right layout of the names is incompatible with the center 
alignment of the response options. Consider, by way of analogy, a stove in 
which burners are aligned in a square but the controls are aligned in a 
straight line from left to right. Most people would have difficulty 
selecting the intended control—and most people would make occasional errors.
</snip>


Bob Hoffmann
846 Mabelle St.
Moscow, ID  83843  USA
Phone: (208) 883-0642
Fax: (877) 495-2279