Ballot Access News by democracy reformer Richard Winger brought an interesting post in Slate magazine to our attention. The article calls for simplifying the ballot that we use to vote. Richard Winger is an expert on American elections and gives his input:
Writer Mark Vanhoenacker, who lives in New York state, has this interesting article in Slate about U.S. ballot design, and why so many U.S. ballots are confusing. He compares some U.S. ballots with European ballots, and a sidebar lets readers look at ballots from some other countries.
Many states do have clear ballots. It happens that New York and New Jersey have the poorest ballot design of any states, at least relative to the part of ballots that includes candidates. Thanks to ElectionUpdates for the link.
Also, the article at Slate had some interesting points:
The shambolic state of ballot design in America remains a potent threat to our democracy. Richard L. Hasen, a leading election expert (and Slate contributor), says it best in hisrecent book: “If you think that a dozen years later the country would have fixed its [election] problems … you’d be dead wrong.” In the 2008 and 2010 elections, by one estimate [PDF], a combined total of more than half a million votes were not counted due to voter errors that imply poor ballot design. (For numerical context, Obama’s 2012 Ohio margin was around 166,000; had around 446,000 votes been different in 2008, President McCain would have won.) But 2012’s relative dearth of cliffhanger recounts, lawsuits, andOnion-caliber open warfare doesn’t mean we’ve fixed our ballots. We just got lucky.
Simplify Ballots Across America
Leave a Reply