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Ballot Design and Voting in the 2004 Elections
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Ballot Design and Voting in the 2004 Election
David C. Kimball
University of Missouri-St. Louis
## email not listed ##
and
Martha Kropf
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
## email not listed ##
Abstract
The 2000 presidential election focused the attention of Americans on the problem of residual votes, the difference between the number of voters going to the polls and the number of valid votes cast for a particular contest. Recent election reform activity in the United States has been devoted to voting equipment, while there is little research on the effects of ballot design. We argue that residual votes are analogous to survey non-response, and that researchers can draw from studies of questionnaire design in self-administered surveys to identify ballot features that may simplify or complicate the voting process. In a pilot study of five states in the 2002 midterm elections, we identified seven ballot features associated with high levels of unrecorded votes in gubernatorial races, which are near the top of the ballot. Our current study is a larger analysis of ballot design in the 2004 general election. We apply our ballot design analysis to voting in the presidential election and on ballot initiatives in the 2004 election. We analyze ballots from roughly 266 counties and towns around the country that used paper-based ballots (either optically scanned or hand-counted ballots). Our preliminary results suggest that ballot design has a significant impact on the ability of people to record their votes, especially in down-ballot contest like initiatives. These results have implications for direct democracy and election reform in the United States.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
Philadelphia, PA, August 31, 2006
*The authors would like to extend a thank you to Lindsay Battles, Cecile Denny, Amanda Armstrong Sztaba, Laura Wiedlocher and Cassie Gross for their helpful research assistance. This study was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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Ballot Design and Voting in the 2004 Election
David C. Kimball
University of Missouri-St. Louis
and
Martha Kropf
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Abstract
The 2000 presidential election focused the attention of Americans on the problem of residual
votes, the difference between the number of voters going to the polls and the number of valid
votes cast for a particular contest. Recent election reform activity in the United States has been
devoted to voting equipment, while there is little research on the effects of ballot design. We
argue that residual votes are analogous to survey non-response, and that researchers can draw
from studies of questionnaire design in self-administered surveys to identify ballot features that
may simplify or complicate the voting process. In a pilot study of five states in the 2002 midterm
elections, we identified seven ballot features associated with high levels of unrecorded votes in
gubernatorial races, which are near the top of the ballot. Our current study is a larger analysis of
ballot design in the 2004 general election. We apply our ballot design analysis to voting in the
presidential election and on ballot initiatives in the 2004 election. We analyze ballots from
roughly 266 counties and towns around the country that used paper-based ballots (either
optically scanned or hand-counted ballots). Our preliminary results suggest that ballot design has
a significant impact on the ability of people to record their votes, especially in down-ballot
contest like initiatives. These results have implications for direct democracy and election reform
in the United States.
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
Philadelphia, PA, August 31, 2006
*The authors would like to extend a thank you to Lindsay Battles, Cecile Denny, Amanda
Armstrong Sztaba, Laura Wiedlocher and Cassie Gross for their helpful research assistance. This
study was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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