New York City Council Survey Shows New York Ballot Design is Voters’ Number One Complaint

The New York city council held an election day survey, and has released its findings.  They reveal that New York city voters’ top complaint about administration of the November 2, 2010 election is the confusing ballot design.  See here.  Thanks to Michael Drucker’s The Independent View for this news.

New York, starting this year, uses paper ballots.  Virtually all other states that use paper ballots designs the ballots so that all the candidates running for one particular office are grouped together.  But New York designs the paper ballots as though the state were still using mechanical voting machines.  When New York used mechanical voting machines, the state used a party column (or party row) format.  Because the mechanical voting machines didn’t have enough rows (or columns) for all the parties, the mechanical voting machines would generally put two parties into the same column.

Now that New York has given up mechanical voting machines, there is no rational reason to maintain that old format, but New York’s paper general election ballots this year mindlessly kept that old format.  The only unqualified party this year that had its own separate column was the Green Party.  And, the only unqualified party this year that definitely polled enough votes to become qualified is the Green Party.

A rational system would mean that each voter would receive more than one ballot card.  There is nothing inherently wrong with giving each voter more than a single card to vote on.  If two or even three cards were permitted, then tiny print would not need to be so tiny, and all the candidates and parties could be treated equally.  Of course not every candidate or party can have the top line on the ballot, but at least the ballot could be arranged to avoid gross discrimination.


Comments

New York City Council Survey Shows New York Ballot Design is Voters’ Number One Complaint — 8 Comments

  1. Scanner ballots —

    about a foot wide and about 2 feet high – offices and issues on both sides.

    one box for straight party votes
    each office box — with all the party hack candidates for the office — in party hack order (rotated in my local regime).

    How STONE AGE primitive/barbarian is the NY regime ???

  2. Until this year’s election, New York City ballots had party names listed left to right along the top, with candidates below them, and the rest of the state had party names listed from top to bottom on the left side with candidates to the right of party names.
    And in our upstate area of New York, The Rent Is Too Damn High and the Greens each had separate lines(these placements were decided by lottery in September), while the others were all forced to share a line with another party. I don’t know if New York City set their machines up differently from the rest of the state as they did in the past (This clear separation must have contributed to the large vote totals for each of these parties).
    @Jim Riley, The City Council Speaker is all of that, and more.

  3. In NY there is state election law and NYC election law. In NYC there is an election law called “Full Face”. This format matched what the old lever machine looked like. Now that the state is using optical scanners with paper ballots, NYC needs to change their election law so the ballots can be designed better. In NYC as part of their election law the ballot format has to include four languages which also makes the format of the ballot complicated.

  4. # 6 multiple languages — see the French-English ongoing WAR in Canada north of the border — quite ready to blow up — east – quebec – middle — west — due to language and regional party hack groups.

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