-Badly designed ballots cause hundreds of thousands of votes
to go uncounted every year,
and with election security concerns
and the push to expand mail-in voting,
it is more important than ever that ballots are easy to use.
So what's the problem?
Unless an election is decided by a slim margin,
voters usually don't know there was even a design flaw.
They hide in plain sight and include issues like candidates
split into different pages or columns or multiple contests
placed on the same electronic screen.
-Ballot design is one of the most overlooked
but important aspects of voting, and in some ways,
voter suppression.
-That's Marc Elias, a lawyer and democratic strategist.
He's been monitoring how ballot design
affects the outcome of elections for years.
-We all remember the butterfly ballot in 2000,
which was an incredibly poorly designed ballot
that may very well have cost Al Gore the presidency,
but it's not just the butterfly ballot.
-In 2018 in Florida's Broward County,
about three-point-seven percent
of voters neglected to choose a U.S. senator.
Three-point-seven percent
may seem like a small number,
but it means more than 30,000 people
did not vote for a senator, and Republican Rick Scott
beat Democrat Bill Nelson by just about 10,000 votes.
What happened?
The Senate race was listed at the bottom
of the first column of the ballot,
blending in with the instructions.
-What we saw was a huge drop off in the number of voters
who voted in that senate race.
-Most ballot design errors are a result
of overworked local officials who don't have the time or staff
to test whether a design works.
It's not a function of intentional bad behavior.
And we're not talking about simply checking one
ballot style per state.
-They've got hundreds or maybe thousands of different
iterative versions of ballots based on the local races
that are being added, or the bond initiatives that
are being added or subtracted, precinct by precinct
in some places.
So it's a real chore, but it's a necessary one.
-Even if the visual design is perfect,
another barrier to voting is needlessly
complicated instructions.
Consider these directions, especially if you have limited
reading skills like 30%
of literate Americans do.
Now here it is in plain language.
Better, right?
Fixing all this should be a greater priority now
that calls for vote by mail are growing.
Western states have been doing it for years,
but there are a lot of hidden barriers
built into vote by mail.
-There is an epidemic of uncounted votes
in this country anyway, where people cast ballots
and they think they've counted, but they haven't.
-Entire mail-in ballots can be disqualified
due to unsigned envelopes, signed envelopes with signatures
that don't match the signature the state has on file,
and ballots not arriving by election day.
Those issues contributed to
one-point-four percent
of mail-in ballots being rejected in 2018.
In a presidential year, that could be hundreds
of thousands of votes.
-It's more important than ever as we head
towards the 2020 general election
that the American people have confidence
that the voting system is open and fair
and that every citizen who's lawfully eligible
to cast a ballot is able to cast it
and have it counted and counted accurately.
And that exists.
States need to act now to bolster confidence
in the election machinery and in the election processes.
-Republican and Democratic party lawyers like Elias
are waging court battles about what they think is fair,
but the winners should be voters.
Ballot design flaws threaten the democratic process,
and state and federal officials can do better.
Here's how.
All states should publicize sample ballots before elections
and reveal the number of spoiled votes after elections.
Laws should be amended to support good design.
Ballots should be tested before they're used
in an election, and we should all
double check our ballots to make sure we voted
the way we meant to.
Voting is challenging enough.
Design flaws should not get in the way of democracy.