If you read this article, and looked at the ballot, and your first reaction was, “that ballot isn’t confusing, I would have understood it”, then good for you. Maybe someday you’ll realize that not everyone is as brilliant as you think you are.
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For a country that styles itself a beacon of democracy we sure make it difficult for citizens to cast votes for the candidates of their choice.
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Creole of the Haitian variety, not Louisiana.
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Not we. Republicans. Democrats don’t cheat that way.
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FiveThirtyEight has a deep dive into it
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I’m talking about the country as a whole. The Dems certainly aren’t chronic cheaters like the GOP, but I have yet to see them calling for basic remedies like national standards on voting machines and ballots or even making election day a national bank holiday that celebrates democracy. The result of the country’s political culture:
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Mmmm - I can agree the butterfly design is confusing. This ballot is ugly and could be helped by better spacing, so there is room for improvement. As someone who has to alter medical forms often, creating an ugly form is super easy, evidently.
But if you can’t be bothered to glance down the whole column two see two spots to fill in, that is on you. Just like if you filled in the 2nd column and didn’t go to the third. Or don’t turn it over to the back like in the last ballot I used. Or not go back and make sure you didn’t skip filling in a dot.
Also, is one party voter more likely to miss the rest of that column than another? I figured the stereotype would be the average R voter would get confused the most easily.
I just think it is terrible that the guy who has been governor in Florida over the last several years didn’t do something about the Broward County elections, over which he had ultimate authority. That guy should lose his job, and maybe be barred from other political offices.
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But there is no such thing as being too “dumb” to be allowed to vote. There’s no IQ test for voting. The votes of “dumb” people are supposed to count just as much as the votes of everyone else. And if the goal of an election is to accurately record the preferences of all legitimate voters, then then ballots should be designed to be as easy to understand as possible for all people, even dumb people.
If the ballot isn’t achieving that goal then we can still say it’s a bad design, even if genius Internet commenters like us have no problems with it.
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I saw something about how, with 49%, the mid-terms had the biggest turn out for (non-presidential) election in 104 years, I think it was. With not even quite half the voters. Jesus.
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Creole in the US tends to mean something very specific but what most Americans might not be aware of is that the word is a term for mixed race (typically European + African). In Latin America the word comes up a ton, especially when describing culture/cuisine/music/etc. In Spanish it is Criollo (pronounced Cree-oh-yo).
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I am familiar with it as a term for mixed language, not race. In Haiti, a mix of several West African languages with French, one step up from a pidgin. Louisiana Creole seems to be French and English, but in fairness, not so familiar with that one.
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I wonder what a ballot for a Republican district looks like then. I would hope/expect that the Senate candidates are in about the same place.
If so, wouldn’t this be equal-opportunity bad design? As has been abundantly noted on BB, the Democratic party does not have a lock on less-literate voters.
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Gotta just leave this here as the designers are likely Republicans:
Republicans do not want people to vote.
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Remove the instructions and the non-English stuff and it’s nearly identical to my MN ballot.
There are differences, sure, but both parties engage in voter suppression.
Listen to the bit of this beginning at 1:09:25 for some stories of voting shenanigans in New York.
Or see this map:
Those aren’t just GOP states.
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Tom Delay and the republican party made it very much a large well funded project to gerrymander the country. They have put WAY more effort into this then the dems.
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Which is exactly what you’re supposed to do with your ballot – look at it closely before you turn it in. That’s just common sense.
That’s also true.
So on the one hand it’s hard to place all of the blame on whoever designed the ballots. On the other hand, it’s understandable that people would be confused, especially if they had to line up at a polling place to fill out their ballots on an otherwise busy day (and what weekday isn’t). Vote by mail would definitely help in this situation, because voters could have a chance to take a close look at their ballots and figure out who they were going to vote for over the period of a couple of weeks.
If one person marked the wrong candidate then the voter screwed up.
If thousands of people marked the wrong candidate, even if those thousands make a relatively small portion of the overall electorate, then the ballot designers screwed up.
It’s not supposed to be a test.
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Note that the republican candidate is always listed first.
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