Florida voting debacle: blame the ballots

Debate continues to rage as to what caused 18,000 votes for Florida House district 13 to not register in the 2006 mid-term elections -- one out of seven ballots cast, likely tipping the result of a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

Two studies support the theory that bad ballot design was to blame. As electionline.org reports:

In a study published in late November, researchers at Dartmouth University asserted that it was the design of the ballot used by Sarasota County that contributed to a 14.8 percent undervote in the race for the 13th District. [...]
An analysis of the election published this week in the Herald Tribune further supports the findings of the Dartmouth study. The newspaper analyzed every vote cast and discovered that loyal party voters — both Republican and Democrat — were largely responsible for the undervote in Sarasota. Nearly 60 percent of the 18,000 undervotes in the race came from voters who otherwise voted along party lines.

The paper found that since Florida switched to optical scan and touch-screen voting machines the undervote rates in state and federal races dropped from 6 percent to around 3 percent. Only five contests since 2002 have produced an undervote over 10 percent — four of them occurred this year and all occurred in jurisdictions using the iVotronic touch screens produced by Omaha, Neb.-based ES&S.

News today from the Florida Herald-Tribune only deepens the controversy. The paper reports that the sample ballot mailed out to Sarasota County's registered voters before the election didn't match what they found on Election Day:

Problems in Sarasota County voting booths last month may have started long before Election Day.

In an effort to save money, Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent mailed a simplified sample ballot to every voter in the county.

The sample ballot was similar to what voters saw when they entered voting booths. But key differences between the two ballots may have helped stoke voter confusion and exacerbated problems voters had finding the District 13 congressional race on touch-screen machines, experts say.

BradBlog further notes that Sarasota County's election officials gave out advice on their website that mis-states how to report undervote problems.