Ballot Design Research Articles

Election administration harms and ballot design: A study of Florida's 2018 United States Senate race

AbstractWe introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot‐level and precinct‐level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design flouted federal guidelines and, according to critics, was pivotal to the outcome. We estimate that Broward's ballot design induced roughly 25,000 voters to undervote in a race determined by about 10,000 votes and that these excess undervotes were concentrated among low‐information voters. Broward's ballot did not, however, affect the outcome of the election. Nonetheless, flawed ballot designs are still concerning in an age of voter distrust. Given the risk that flawed ballots can cause systemic harm, we offer a roadmap for procedural reforms to improve ballot design.

Analyzing Ballot Order Effects When Voters Rank Candidates

Abstract How does candidate order on the ballot affect voting behavior when voters rank candidates? I extend the analysis of ballot order effects to electoral systems with ordinal ballots, where voters rank candidates, including ranked-choice voting (RCV). First, I discuss two types of ballot order effects, including “position effects”—voters vote for specific candidates because of their ballot positions—and “pattern ranking”—voters rank candidates geometrically given their grid-style ballots. Next, I discuss experimental designs for identifying and estimating these effects based on ballot order randomization. Moreover, I illustrate the proposed methods by using survey and natural experiments based on mayoral and congressional RCV elections in 2022. I find that while voters seem less susceptible to specific ballot positions, ballot design can still impact voters’ ranking behavior via pattern ranking. This work has several implications for ballot design, survey research, and ranking data analysis. First, it shows that pattern ranking may affect electoral outcomes in RCV and other systems even when ballot order is fully randomized. Consequently, it may be worth considering an alternative solution to ballot order effects, which does not solely depend on randomization or rotation. Second, similar effects may impact any survey research using ranking questions. Future research must investigate the statistical consequences of pattern ranking for survey research. Finally, ranking data allow researchers to study diverse quantities of interest while targeting many different substantive questions. However, this flexibility also implies that analyzing ranking data can be prone to arbitrary analysis.

Voice Recognition Systems for The Disabled Electorate: Critical Review on Architectures and Authentication Strategies

An inevitable factor that makes the concept of electronic voting irresistible is the fact that it offers the possibility of exceeding the manual voting process in terms of convenience, widespread participation, and consideration for People Living with Disabilities. The underlying voting technology and ballot design can determine the credibility of election results, influence how voters felt about their ability to exercise their right to vote, and their willingness to accept the legitimacy of electoral results. However, the adoption of e-voting systems has unveiled a new set of problems such as security threats, trust, and reliability of voting systems and the electoral process itself. This paper presents a critical literature review on concepts, architectures, and existing authentication strategies in voice recognition systems for the e-voting system for the disabled electorate. Consequently, in this paper, an intelligent yet secure scheme for electronic voting systems specifically for people living with disabilities is presented.

Ballot Reform, the Personal Vote, and Political Representation in the United States

AbstractTheories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics.

Lessons from The Politics of Ballot Design: A Review Article

WHEN THE 2000 ELECTION REVEALED WEAKNESSES in U.S. election administration, scholars gathered what they knew about the topic. While scholars had not done extensive research on election administration issues, there was some: training election officials,1 punchcard voting machines,2 roll-off,3 straight-party voting,4 the consequences of the Australian ballot,5 and, of course, ballot design.6 Research conducted in the wake of the 2000 election made it starkly clear that because of the hyper-decentralization of elections in the United States, data were not centralized, nor were concepts consistently defined. Even data basic to an election, such as “voter turnout,” was not consistently defined across states or local jurisdictions. Scholars went to work. Elections and election data collection have improved since 2000.7 Scholars and practitioners continue to advance the theoretical and scientific study of election administration, and they are helping improve the day-to-day operations of election administration in the United States. In fact, an interdisciplinary group that includes both scholars and election officials—Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration, or ESRA—has met each summer since 2017. This group's annual conference “brings together election experts from academia, state and local government, non-profits, and research institutes to develop empirical approaches to the study of how law and administrative procedures affect the quality of elections in the United States.”8 Often with guidance from election officials, scholars have examined such important and timely topics as how to operate elections during a pandemic,9 voting rights and disenfranchisement,10 how the public regards elections and their legitimacy,11 and straight-party ballots, as well as other aspects of ballot design.12 Paul Herrnson and colleagues have analyzed the straight-party box on office-block ballots using experimental research (of course, experiments increase confidence in causal inference). Their work is based on usability theory and research: “systems with simple, straightforward, end-to-end design, involving fewer steps, requiring little user memory, giving confirmation of one's actions, and providing system-based help are more effective than systems that have added complexity, require individuals to remember previous actions, do not provide assistance with cognitive tasks, and are inefficient.”13 Election science scholars are still collecting and centralizing data from local jurisdictions (counties and townships) around the nation. One of the latest data points gathered is how much local jurisdictions spend to administer elections.14 While ESRA is a nascent organization, scholars have been publishing important election science research—many times in major journals—for quite some time.

Why Is This Candidate Listed Twice? The Behavioral and Electoral Consequences of Fusion Voting

Ballot fusion is an electoral device used in some states that permits multiple parties to endorse the same candidate for public office. The practice is at the center of a fierce policy debate concerning the legality and efficacy of ballot design: critics say fusion allows minor parties to hijack mainstream parties and complicates the voting process; advocates say fusion reduces the potential for wasted votes and increases democratic efficacy in the electorate. Participants in this policy debate all cite the welfare of the voting public in defending their views, yet claims on both sides are based on assumptions that may or may not stand up to empirical scrutiny. In this article, we fill a void in the literature by exploring whether, and to what extent, fusion voting impacts voters' perceptions, decisions, and overall voting experience. We develop a survey experiment in which individuals make electoral choices under a series of ballot designs, enabling us to evaluate counterfactuals concerning ballot fusion for the first time: how do individuals evaluating a ballot with fusion behave relative to voters who evaluate the same ballot without it? The results have important implications for electoral policy makers: ballot fusion has little impact on feelings of democratic efficacy and voting behavior, though it can compel some individuals to update their perceptions about political parties under certain circumstances.

The Politics of Ballot Design: How States Shape American Democracy. By Erik J. Engstrom and Jason M. Roberts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 151p. $99.99 cloth.

The Politics of Ballot Design: How States Shape American Democracy. By Erik J. Engstrom and Jason M. Roberts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 151p. $99.99 cloth.

Party-related primacy effects in proportional representation systems: evidence from a natural experiment in Polish local elections

We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties’ positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party’s normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.

How influential is ballot design in elections?

ABSTRACT We exploit an original dataset from a referendum in Peru to study the influence of voting “arrangements” on electoral outcomes. The relative importance of these arrangements (e.g. ballot design) with respect to the fundamentals (e.g. ideology, candidates’ quality) has not been measured. After controlling for a comprehensive set of politicians’ characteristics, we estimate unbiased ballot order effects making use of the within party variation in outcomes. We estimate a non-linear proba-bility model and we create counterfactuals to conclude that ballot design not only may have changed the electoral results but also has a greater importance than candidates’ ideology, education, experience and party affiliation.

Grabbing Life by the Ballot: Creating an Effective Ballot through Design

This presentation, reflecting a politics undergraduate thesis, will explore the design process behind the ballots that voters use in democratic elections around the world. Ballots are an inherently political objects, and in many cases, the most direct line of communication a citizen has to the government of their country. As such, the design of the ballot affects the legitimacy of higher level electoral and democratic institutions. This project argues that by co-opting the language of product design, a universal ballot design process would make more efficient ballots across the globe.
 
 Product design starts with a brainstorming stage that explores at the user, the goal of the object, and the context of its use to create an effective design. By applying these observations to the process of designing a ballot, each electoral commission can produce a more effective ballot. Currently there is no standardization for ballot design other than ensuring that electoral commissions tried to make it “friendly.” By examining cases of bad ballot design, it is possible to see what element of the design process was missed or misused to create a process that corrects for these mistakes. This project examines poorly designed ballots in Florida, Scotland, and Colombia to explore the large-scale effects these small design choices make, and how to fix them.

Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System with Special Ballot and Block Structures that Complies with Indonesian Principle of Voting

Blockchain technology could be implemented not only in digital currency, but also in other fields. One such implementation is in democratic life, namely voting. This research focuses on designing a blockchain-based electronic voting system for medium to large-scale usage that complies with law, specifically voting principles in Indonesia. In this research, we proposed the following: a ballot design as block transaction employing UUID version 4, a modified block structure using SHA3-256 hash algorithm, and a voting protocol. The minimum length of a ballot is 43 bytes (excluding ECDSA signature) if one character is used as candidate’s identifier and timestamp is stored as integer. We built a simulation program using Python-based Django web framework to cast 10,000 votes and mine them into blocks. Tampered transactions in each block could be detected and restored by synchronizing data with another node. We also evaluated the proposed system. By using this system, voters can exercise voting principles in Indonesia: direct, public, free, confidential, honest, and fair.

Lessons from International Multi‐Option Referendum Experiences

AbstractReferendums are regularly criticised for reducing complex policy decisions to two maximally opposed options. This reduces opportunities for voter expression and can polarise debates. Alternative referendum designs which present more than two ballot options can offer innovative opportunities, but also raise new challenges. We can benefit by learning from previous experiences with multi‐option referendum voting. Discussions of such experiences are rare and have often focussed on a limited number of cases. This article provides an overview of over 100 multi‐option referendum experiences around the world. It discusses the topics on which they were held and the ballot options that were offered. It then analyses the variety in ballot design in terms of questions posed and voting methods applied. Drawing on the experiences of multi‐option referendums, the article concludes with lessons that can be learned in relation to initiating and designing these referendums.

Ballot Paper Design and Vote Spoiling at Polish Local Elections of 2014: Establishing a Causal Link

Large proportions of spoilt ballots may lead to a distortion of election results. While invalid votes are sometimes meaningful political acts, reflecting political protest, spoilt ballot papers may also be a consequence of voter error, which can be attributed to the poor design of a ballot paper. In this study, we focus on the widely publicized case of the Polish local elections of 2014. These elections saw unprecedentedly large proportions of spoilt votes, and ballot paper format was often mentioned as a potential culprit. Yet it remains largely unclear whether or not there indeed does exist a cause-and-effect relationship between ballot card format and the tendency of voters to cast invalid votes. We argue that what we deliver here is the first methodologically refined test of the aforementioned hypothesis. We apply the generalized synthetic control comparative method, proposed by Yiquing Xu (in 2017), and show that the implementation of a complex or ambiguous ballot design can result in a substantial increase in the rate of spoilt votes. We thus demonstrate that ballot paper design matters. Specifically, the results of this study corroborate the existence of a cause-and-effect relationship between ballot paper format and the fraction of invalid votes in the 2014 municipal elections in Poland.

When do consultative referendums improve democracy? Evidence from local referendums in Norway

Consultative referendums may provide crucial information about public opinion but have received little attention in the literature compared with their binding counterparts. In this article, we analyse 221 Norwegian local consultative referendums on municipal amalgamation using the Venice Commission’s code on referendums. Much of the referendum literature suggests that consultative referendums are in fact binding. The municipal councils followed the outcomes of the referendums in most cases, but 14% chose to go against it. While the overall impression is that the outcomes of consultative referendums are seen as binding, the data indicate that ballot design may affect voters’ choice as well as council decisions. Although many democratic standards were met, the wording of questions and alternatives on the ballot paper were problematic in a number of cases – reducing the democratic value of the citizens’ advice.

Bad news is bad news: Information effects and citizens’ socio-political acceptance of new technologies of electricity transmission

This contribution focuses on citizens’ attitudes towards new technologies in electricity transmission and asks how information provision affects citizens’ attitudes towards different technological solutions. It is thereby assumed that the relevance of information is contingent on whether a technology is new or established, as well as on how the information is framed. Electricity transmission is linked to the transition of energy systems from fossil and nuclear to renewable sources. The analyses therefore contribute to the ongoing debate on how to successfully implement new technical solutions in renewable energy policy. Methodologically, the paper uses novel data from a large-scale population survey conducted in Switzerland and tests information effects based on an experimental split ballot design. The results reveal that whereas public opinion on conventional technologies is rather stable, citizens react strongly to information on new technical solutions. This is particularly the case if the information emphasizes negative aspects and uncertainties of the new technologies. Moreover, such negative information can barely be compensated by simultaneous positive information.

Winners and Losers of the Ballot: Electronic vs. Traditional Paper Voting Systems in Brazil

AbstractScholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.

Misleading Ballot Position Cue: Party Voting in Korea's Nonpartisan Local Elections

In this study, I present evidence that ballot design can provide a misleading cue to voters. In South Korea, nonpartisan municipal legislative elections were held concurrently with other partisan local elections until 2002. The ballot order of the candidates running in nonpartisan elections was randomly determined, whereas it was determined according to a party's number of seats in the national legislature for candidates running in partisan elections. Therefore, if voters are fully informed, the vote share for the candidate listed first in the nonpartisan ballot should not be correlated with the vote share for the party listed first on the partisan ballot. However, I find that the vote share for a first-listed candidate increases when the first-listed party's vote share increases. I also find some suggestive evidence that incumbency can reduce the degree to which voters mistakenly use ballot position as a party cue.

How Nonpartisan Ballot Design Conceals Partisanship: A Survey Experiment of School Board Members in Two States

Studies suggest that between one-fourth and one-third of localities elect their leaders on partisan ballots. Does the presence of a party label on the ballot affect the level of partisanship in local office? I leverage the fact that within select states, school boards vary as to whether their members are elected on partisan or nonpartisan ballots. Do the differences in policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans differ across these ballot contexts? Does a party cue treatment, where respondents are reminded of the general policy positions of both parties, differentially affect elected officials in different ballot contexts? Evidence from the survey reveals a group of “polarized nonpartisans” who tend to express more partisan views about public policy than their co-partisans elected in an explicitly partisan system. At the same time, providing party cues in policy debates disproportionately moves those elected on partisan ballots as opposed to nonpartisan ones. That partisan-elected officials are more influenced by party cues appears to validate the motivations of nonpartisan reformers, yet the “polarized nonpartisans” found in the control group should give those reformers pause and reveals the need for continued research into the behavioral consequences of nonpartisan ballots.

Ballot design and invalid votes: Evidence from Colombia

We examine the tendency for complex ballots to undermine the ability of voters to cast valid votes. Specifically, we investigate the role of ballot design in explaining the high rate of invalid votes in Colombia observed in 2007. We address this question first by looking at data from a study observing the use of alternate ballot designs in a controlled environment, varying the information voters have when attempting to cast the ballot. Our results show that there is an effect of the ballot design on the amount of invalid votes and that this effect varies with education level. We then examine the observed pattern of invalid votes in Colombia before and after the implementation of the ballot redesign. Our results suggest that the introduction of a ballot with improved usability was associated with a significant decline in the number of invalid votes and that a rural-urban difference observed before the new ballot was no longer present.

Heuristic-Driven Recommendations for Improving U.S. Voting

Human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) can play a role in improving equal opportunity in U.S. voting through the redesign of inefficient voting processes that lead to low voter turnout. This article, which derives from the authors’ winning entry in the HFES 2014 “Voting Systems of Tomorrow” competition, outlines HF/E-driven recommendations for improving the American voting process. These recommendations include a “one-stop shop” for all voting-related information, personalized voter accounts, appointment systems, and several ballot design suggestions. Implementation of these recommendations, on any level, has the potential to improve the proficiency of polling places, lower all-too-common lengthy wait times, and ensure that ballots are accessible to all voters.