Money in New York Politics

The Brennan Center regularly compiles the latest news concerning the corrosive nature of money in New York State politics—and the ongoing need for public financing and robust campaign finance reform. This week’s links were contributed by Eric Petry.

For more stories on an ongoing basis, follow the Twitter hashtags#moNeYpolitics and #fairelex.

NEW YORK

City Board of Elections Creates Another Poorly Designed Ballot

The New York City Board of Elections has come under scrutiny in recent years for designing confusing ballots that led to tens of thousands of votes being thrown out as invalid. It appears that 2014 could be no different. One of the recurring issues with the Board’s ballots has been that candidates for the same races are split onto multiple lines. Splitting contests, which this year’s ballot does, can cause voters to accidentally choose more than one candidate when completing their ballot. Another troubling design feature of this year’s ballot is that it favors the major parties, while discriminating against the minor parties. Voters who support the Democrats or Republicans will find the ballot very straightforward, because Democratic and Republican candidates are aligned separately from the minor party candidates. Minor party voters, on the other hand, will have to search through the confusing cluster of other candidates to find their choice. The Brennan Center for Justice, a consistent advocate for ballot improvement, sent a letter to the New York City Board of Elections this week detailing how the design flaws harm minor political parties, and urging the Board to take action to address these issues.

Voter Friendly Ballot Act Passes Assembly

We just got word that the Voter Friendly Ballot Act has passed in the Assembly.

The Voter Friendly Ballot Act is product of collaboration between New York State Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, the Brennan Center, the Usability Professionals Association, and AIGA, the professional association for design. The bill was introduced to give election officials the flexibility to create ballots that are simple and easy for New Yorkers to use and understand. A major Election Day complaint in 2010 was that the ballots were confusing and difficult to read. The state’s ballot design is governed by strict guidelines in the election law that were written for the recently-replaced mechanical lever voting machines.

The legislation would update the antiquated laws governing ballot design and would allow election officials to create ballots that contain shorter instructions that are easy to understand and free of legal jargon. It would display candidates’ names in clear, bold, readable text. It would reduce ambiguity and confusion by positioning fill-in ovals directly next to candidates’ names on the left. The bill would also allow for increased text size and legibility by reducing clutter near candidates’ names.

Here’s an example of the types of ballots the bill would allow election officials to create – a major improvement from 2010.

Making sure that ballots are not confusing and easy to read is something politicians of all political stripes should be able to agree on.  We hope the Senate follows the Assembly’s lead ASAP.

The other factor that could decide the Senate contest in Brooklyn

Although both sides have declared victory, the race to replace State Senator Carl Krueger remains too close to call. The preliminary results released by the Board of Elections show David Storobin with a 143 vote lead over Lew Fidler. While several news outlets have focused on the 757 absentee ballots which remain to be counted, recent anomalies with New York's voting machines show that in a very close contest, only a hand count can ensure that the right contestant has won.

Just last month, the results of an upstate City Council race declared to have been won by challenger Augustine Beyer by a single vote were overturned after a full hand recount revealed a two-vote discrepancy that tilted the race in incumbent Richard Slisz’s favor. The voting machine was unable to read one improperly marked ballot where the voting oval had been circled rather than filled in. The hand inspection was enough for election officials to determine that the voter's intent had been to vote for Mr. Slisz. Perhaps more troubling however, was the second ballot with a vote for Mr. Slisz’s that was never scanned or registered by the machine at all.

Furthermore, the results from a Daily News investigation into the exceptionally high overvote rates the Brennan Center uncovered in the South Bronx indicate that these voting machines are far from infallible. The Daily News found that one of the machines used to scan ballots in the South Bronx made errors in reading nearly 70 percent of ballots during the September 2010 primary.

In our report analyzing overvote rates in New York, we listed one of the precincts in Mr. Kruger’s district — AD 46, ED 051— as having Brooklyn’s 8^th highest overvote rate in 2010. Many other precincts in this senate district did not provide any data at all, but given the demographics of the district, it seems likely that there were other precincts with high overvote rates both in 2010 and 2012. In some of those cases, voter intent may be clear to the human eye, but not a machine.

Unfortunately, New York City does not publish the number overvotes — as is done in Rockland County— making it virtually impossible for anyone outside the Board of Elections to identify areas where voting machines have registered high rates of uncounted votes.

A provision adopted by the City Board of Elections requires a hand recount of paper ballots in contests where the margin of victory is less than 10 votes or half a percent of the total votes cast. Given the newness of these machines and recent history, even a margin slightly higher may warrant a careful hand recount to ensure that the actual winner is declared the victor. If a recount does happen, look for totals (and maybe even the declared winner) to change.

New Efforts to Improve Ballot Design

We’re always interested in learning about new projects to improve elections, so we thought we would share an exciting new proposal to make it easier for election administrators to improve ballot design. By applying the basic design principles to ballots, Field Guidelines to Ensure Voter Intent proposes to publish a series of books with guidelines and examples of common ballot design problems to help election officials employ ballot design techniques that help ensure that every vote is cast as voters intend.

As the Brennan Center found in Better Ballots, common problems due to poor ballot design and instructions have led to the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters. As recently as last week, we were reminded of the importance ballot design can play in a close election. The results of a hotly contested City Council race in upstate New York were overturned after a hand recount found that a voting machine had not properly counted two ballots. One of the two ballots in question was improperly marked; a voter had circled an oval instead of filling it in. Although the machine was unable to detect the vote,the voter’s intent was clear to election officials as they reviewed the ballot. The margin of victory in that election was a single vote. Mistakes like these can often be prevented through clearer instructions on how to properly mark a ballot.

In this upcoming election season, we hope to see more important tools like these that will help election officials prepare for elections.

Guest Post: Democracy by Design — Voter Friendly Ballot Act Offers Sleek, Simple Solution

When searching for their next computer, cell-phone, or weather app, many consumers prioritize sleek, minimalistic designs, simple interfaces, and easy-to-understand language over increased information and data capabilities. The more user-friendly a product, the more likely it is to suit the average American’s needs. Often overlooked, there is another place to demand usability, not as consumers, but as voters—in the voting booth.

Our choices on Election Day lay the foundation for democracy. Voting provides an essential safeguard against corruption and allows voters to ensure that representatives stay accountable. And despite what you may think about the worth of one vote, thousands of votes—taken together—count a great deal. Yet every election, many thousands of votes are tossed aside and rejected as a result of a number of administrative and voting errors. Poorly designed voting ballots are just one source of this injustice.

When thousands of voters in Palm Beach County, Florida protested that they had read the ballot incorrectly and mistakenly voted for the wrong person in the 2000 Presidential Election, the infamous butterfly ballot spotlighted the necessity of a clearly formatted and easy to understand ballot. Yet twelve years later, voting citizens across the United States still face unreasonably confusing and maze-like ballots and machines.

For instance, in the 2010 New York State elections, nearly 60,000 votes statewide were not counted because the machines read them as being mismarked. This was no doubt in large part due to the fact that New York’s ballots are among the most difficult to use in the country. The problems with these ballots are wide-ranging. In some cases, a voter may simply have not correctly followed the lengthy, jargon-y voting instructions. In other cases, ill-defined and arbitrary boxes may make the lines between candidates and contests incomprehensible, leading voters to vote for too many candidates. Indeed, the real question is not philosophical—“does my vote count?”— but very concrete—“is my vote being counted at all?”

Luckily, there is a solution. After spending the 2011 session in Committee, the Voter Friendly Ballot Act (A07492B), a bill providing guidelines for simplifying New York State’s ballot design, was reintroduced to the New York State Assembly by Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh (D-Manhattan) last month. Having garnered support through a late-November New York City Council Resolution promoting its enactment, it is definitely a bill worth following.

In order to reduce Election Day confusion, the legislation provides for minimum font sizes, shorter, more concise directions, and less cluttered response box formats. The guidelines also support a number of “suggested” rather than “required” formats (such as shading and font styles), in order to both offer design flexibility and accommodate counties facing different voting machine technologies and election or candidate-specific circumstances. In sum, the legislation is a straightforward solution to a simple yet infinitely problematic barrier to voting. By creating ballots that are easier to read with directions that are easier to understand, this bill could make voting booths more efficient and less intimidating.

At a time when voter turnout is low and public disillusionment high, an ambiguous and confusing ballot is simply unacceptable. While increasingly complex in technologies, our society constantly prioritizes conciseness and efficiency. In a world where over one-third of American adults own a smartphone and billions of 140-character ideas are disbursed per day, a ballot that is similarly sleek, user-friendly, and to-the-point is an entirely reasonable expectation—one that we, as New Yorkers and Americans, should demand.

The Voter Friendly Ballot Act is an essential step in the right direction and one which, once taken, will provide a tangible effect both on the next election and on the individual voter—that is, the next time you step into the voting booth.

Brandi Lupo is a junior at NYU studying Political Economy and Legal Theory.