Not Quite a Blog

(Cross-posted to the OurVoteLive blog.)

My name is Joseph Lorenzo Hall; I'm a postdoctoral researcher jointly affiliated with the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy via the NSF ACCURATE e-voting center. I'll be blogging here occasionally up until election day about lingering issues and then on election day providing some real-time analysis of election incidents as they come through the OurVoteLive hotline.

Elections in the United States are a strange beast. Laws, regulations, procedures and such change drastically from state to state and often from county to county. Straight-party voting -- where a voter can vote for a party and have all their choices for that party reflected on their entire ballot at once -- is used in a number of states, in essence to simplify the voting process. Unfortunately, between the vagaries of how straight-party voting works in different places and the quirks of how voting machines implement this feature, many voters are left scratching their heads.

The OurVoteLive hotline has been receiving a few reports of problems with straight-party voting. Voters in places where there are some quirks, explained below, have reported concerns, notably in North Carolina (#3501, #796) and Texas (#3367). Unfortunately, we've also received calls from states where we are not aware of any weirdness with the laws or technology of straight party voting, like in Michigan (#3053) and Alabama (#2924). So, what's going on here?

As described by Joyce McCloy and Justin Moore of the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting ("North Carolina Straight Ticket Confusion") and Larry Norden and Margaret Chen of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice ("How Bad is North Carolina’s Ballot Flaw? The Numbers Say, Pretty Bad."), North Carolina's scheme for straight-party voting is perhaps the worst. When you choose the straight party option in NC, it expressly does not include a choice for President or Vice-President. On optical scan ballots, they attempt to explain this and even go as far as putting those contests before the straight-party option (although in the same column, which is bad; see Norden and Chen's post above). Justin Moore points out in the post above that this has contributed to a higher than normal rate of abstention from these races in past Presidential election years.

In Texas, we have a different problem: although the straight-party voting laws are more intuitive, the implementation of straight-party voting on the Hart eSlate voting machine can be confusing if not problematic. As ACCURATE Associate Director Dan Wallach describes with copious figures of the voting machine interface ("Vote 'Flipping" on Hart InterCivic eSlate Systems"), after a voter has selected the straight ticket option, the interface moves them down to the next race -- the Presidential contest -- and fills in all the remaining options on the ballot for the chosen party. Unfortunately, the visual indication from the eSlate that a selection has been made in a given contest -- greying out unselected options and adding a reddish square next to their names -- appears to confuse some voters who see this as a sign they should select that option, not that it has been selected already for them. However, if the voter selects this option again, it actually deselects the already selected choice. Whew! Voters have reported choosing the straight-party option and arriving at the review or summary screen only to see one or more options unselected (typically the Presidential contest). To complicate things worse, well-meaning activists have publicized the NC issue far and wide emphasizing the need to select Presidential and Vice-Presidential choices after making the straight ticket choice; of course, this would deselect those choices on the Hart eSlate and result in people casting no vote for those races. This has been frustrating for election officials like Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir who pointed out that she has received at least one report of a "polecat" (i.e., rumormonger) outside a polling place telling people to be sure to explicitly select a Presidential and Vice-Presidential choice if voting straight-party ("Ignore straight-ticket voting rumors, clerk says").

What can we all learn from this? Be sure to "check your work" when voting electronically; carefully examine the review screen or summary screen to make sure that your electronic ballot reflects exactly how you want to vote. If you see something missing or wrong, carefully go back and correct the errant races to make sure your vote is counted as you intended it to be cast.