 | A.
Kam Napier |
The general election falls early in the
month, but before elections slip from our minds entirely, I’m still mulling over
what happened in Hawai’i’s primary election. Nearly 10,000 ballots were invalidated
because voters selected candidates from more than one party, which they weren’t
supposed to do. Hawai’i has a single-party primary.Press accounts described
this as “human error.” So did the state office of elections, which said it would
review its voting instructions and how it trains the precinct officials who give
those instructions. But what if this is not a case of “human error” at all? What
if it’s a case of a confusing ballot design? I’m on this design bent because
I recently read The Design of Everyday Things, by cognitive scientist Donald A.
Norman, who studies how people perform complicated activities (2002, Basic Books).
Norman focuses on the frustrating devices all around us-VCRs, car stereos, the
phone at your office with eight zillion buttons you can never figure out. People
fail to use these things correctly, he insists, because these objects do a poor
job of explaining themselves. “Moreover, whenever people made errors using these
ill-constructed devices, they blamed themselves,” writes Norman. “Serious accidents
are frequently blamed on ‘human error.’ Yet careful analysis of such situations
shows that the design or installation of the equipment has contributed significantly
to the problem.” This pretty much describes what happened in Hawai’i’s primary
election. A ballot is a kind of complicated device, and this year, almost 10,000
people filled them out erroneously. I can see why. In my district, the
front of my “Official Primary Ballot Card” featured four colored boxes, Nonpartisan,
Libertarian, Republican and Democratic. Each of these boxes was, in turn, labeled
a “ballot.” The back was printed with another “ballot,” this one labeled, “Special
Nonpartisan Offices Ballot.”  | Illustration:
Michael Austin |
We’re talking about a single piece
of paper that insists it is actually five different pieces of paper, and we are
supposed to keep track of which ballot is which when the instructions tell us
to “vote within one ballot only.” If I selected one Republican, one Democrat
and one Libertarian, wouldn’t I have voted “within one ballot only?” After all,
they are all on the same piece of paper, itself labeled a “ballot.” Well,
no. That’s not allowed. But that’s the mistake nearly 10,000 voters made. |
Perhaps
the instructions should read “vote within one party only,” a single word change
that could clear up a lot of confusion. (Hey, I don’t just criticize-I wanna help!)
Want proof that the problem rests in the design? Think back to when we
had punch-card ballots, last used in the 1996 election. Back then, each party
ballot literally was a separate card. You picked one, and only one, before you
went into the booth. In the punch-card era, the average ballot invalidation rate
was 0.5 percent. Since we’ve adopted the all-parties-on-the-ballot design, the
average invalidation rate has been 2.88 percent. Fortunately, this isn’t
hanging-chad bad. More than 97 percent of voters filled out the single-party primary
ballot correctly. It just bugs me that we used to nail it 99.5 percent of the
time. However, while the ballot design is fixable, it can only get so simple
as long as Hawai’i insists on running single-party primaries. There’s nothing
sacred about this format. Our single-party primary was created in the 1978 ConCon
and was first used in the 1980 elections. We should consider dumping it. I
think the “error” made by nearly 10,000 voting humans tells us something very
important: When handed a sheet of paper with all the candidates from all the parties
set before us, we want to vote across party lines. It’s only natural. People vote
for people, not parties. We’d be a far less polarized community if elections encouraged
that kind of choice, rather than enforcing party loyalty. |
