From RedrockEater: a report from a Dem observer of the Palm Co recount and a Press Release from Don A. Dillman, American Association for Public Opinion Research, on Palm Beach County Florida Ballot. Dillman was interviewed yesterday about the ballot. He wants to make his position clear.
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 03:44:25 EST From: StevenM820 at aol.com Subject: Florida recount info
Hello again,
Thought you'd like another update from the inside. I spent much of Wed. as the Palm Beach County Dem. Party observer in the recount room at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. Also present were lawyers and a staffer representing GWB, several lawyers representing Gore, representatives of the Reform Party, the Fla. Democratic and Republican Parties, the DNCC, US Rep. Clay Shaw and his Dem. challenger Elaine Bloom (this race is still contested), a Dem. State Senator and a Dem. State Representative from the County.
The recount was supposed to begin at 1:30, was delayed until 4:00 and ended at 11:30. Our role basically consisted of sitting in a cramped room watching five staffers run stacks of puch card ballots through counting machines. Pretty dull all in all until it was discovered that one precinct had not been counted in full. This resulted in a net gain for Al of about 360 votes. The Bush boys lost their smug attitudes and began huddling and whispering every few minutes.
The absentees came through for Al too. When one votes at the polls in Florida, they provide a punch instrument which, if used correctly, completely perforates the ballot. However, absentee voters often use a pen or other implement which does not fully perforate the card. This was apparent to us from the fact that over 10,000 voters in the County, about 2.2% of the overall turnout did not make any choice in the Presidential race, but did vote in the US Senate or Congressional races. We theorized that many voters had partially perforated the card, but the machines weren't reading them. The more times the ballots are run through the counting machine, the more likely the loosened chits fall off.
When the absentees were counted, 221 ballots that had previously registered no vote now did show a vote in the Presidential race. These went overwhelmingly for Gore, leading to some whooping and high fiving from our side. The Bushies really lost it at this point and got a little hostile with the staffers, which in turn elicited some harsh responses from the assembled masses.
Gore's net gain in the County was 643. Word from other counties is that Gore closed the 1,700 deficit by over 1,200. Only half of the counties conducted their recounts on Wednesday. The rest are on Thursday.
The bigger problem is that the ballot in Palm Beach County, which differs in its layout from the ballots elsewhere in the State, is illegal for several reasons. Florida statutes specifically mandate the precise layout of the ballot and the order of candidates. The law was not followed. Bush's name was first, with Buchanan below him and Gore third. This is completely improper, as well as the fact that the law requires the names to be placed to the left with the punch holes to the right of the candidates' names. On this ballot, some names were on the right and some on the left, with all of the punch holes in the middle. It was difficult to line up the name with the correct hole.
Moreover, 19,000 ballots were disqualified because they voted for two or more candidates. This is a direct result of the confusing layout of the names on the ballot. This represents over 4% of the total ballots. It was as high as 15% in some predominantly African-American precincts and about 10% in some precincts with large numbers of Jewish retirees. The Gore vote in many of these precincts was over 90%.
This explains the networks' exit polling which reflected voters' belief that they had voted for Gore, but in fact their ballots had been disqualified. This led to the initial awarding of Florida to Gore.
Folks, the bottom line is that if the names on the ballot were properly situated Gore would have had an additional 11-13,000 vote margin in this County, and the election would be over. We have done a precinct by precinct analysis of where the disqualified votes came from. By attributing the same percentage of the vote Gore obtained in those precincts to the disqualified ballots, Gore would be winning Florida by at least 10,000 votes. In other words, Gore has actually won the election both in the popular vote and in the electoral vote, but he may well still lose it.
You should also be aware that other large counties in the State disqualified about one half of one percent of their ballots for casting two or more votes in the Presidential race. In Palm Beach County it was 4.4%.
Lastly, don't expect the recount to be over on Thursday, as the media is stating. Legal actions are underway. The next question, will a judge order a re-vote just in Palm Beach County with a new ballot?
Steven Meyer '86
Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2000 16:15:51 -0800 From: Don Dillman <dillman at wsu.edu> To: aapornet at usc.edu Subject: Palm Beach Ballot
Yesterday I was interviewed by an AP reporter who faxed me a copy of the Palm Beach County ballot and interviewed me a few minutes later. I was quoted in her article that appeared today in a number of media outlets, where I was identified as being from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Two things seemed apparent to me after the phone call. One was that I was likely to be called by other media people and asked to react, and second, that the visual design issues, at least as I see them, are somewhat complex.
Consequently, I decided to put together a written statement concerning the problems I think the ballot exhibits, which I am inserting below in this message. I am sending this to AAPORNET partly because of the number of messages that have appeared about the ballot in the last two days. Also I want to make it clear to the members of AAPOR that I am speaking as an individual on this issue, and not as a representative of AAPOR or my employer, Washington State University. Thus, I have added what I hope is a clarifying statement that this statement represents my personal opinions based on past research and experiences in the development of self-administered questionnaires.
November 9, 2000
Statement by Don A. Dillman on Palm Beach County Florida Ballot
Several people have asked for my opinion on whether the format of the November 7, 2000, general election ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, resulted in more people voting for Buchanan that had intended to do so. This statement is in response to those requests.
I cannot say with certainty whether the format of this ballot affected a certain number of people who thus voted by mistake for Pat Buchanan, while intending to vote for another candidate. That would require knowledge of what specific people did in the voting booth Tuesday, which I don't have. However, based on my experiences and past research concerning how the visual format of questionnaires affects respondents to surveys, I believe it is likely that certain visual features of the ballot resulted in some individuals who wished to vote for Gore inadvertently punching the second hole in the column, thus resulting in a vote for Buchanan. These visual attributes may also have resulted in double punches as people attempted to correct their error. However, I do not think that voters who intended to vote for Bush were similarly affected.
I believe this outcome occurred because of the joint effects of several undesirable features of the Palm Beach County ballot, rather than a single attribute. These factors include: (1) the listing of some candidates for President on the left-hand page of the ballot, while others were listed in a separate group on the right-hand page; (2) use of a single column of circles between the pages to register one's vote, regardless of which page contained the candidate's name; (3) the lack of familiarity some people may have had with how to answer a punch ballot printed in this format; (4) the likelihood that most people knew which candidate they wanted to vote for prior to seeing any of the choices on the ballot; (5) the location of the presidential choices on the first pages of the ballot; and (6) the visual process people typically follow when registering preferences on a survey questionnaire or election ballot when it is unnecessary to read all choices (names of presidential candidates, for example) before registering one's vote. In order to mark their ballot, it was necessary for people to insert their paper ballot underneath the booklet that showed the ballot choices. They were then required to use a stick-pin answering device to punch through a circle on the ballot to make a hole in the paper ballot.
When people open and/or begin to read material printed in a booklet format, they tend to look first at the left-hand page and focus their attention there. Because this is a ballot in which most people expect to vote on most or all of the choices, it is also likely that they would expect to answer the questions in order. It is therefore likely that many voters began reading the left-hand page without first looking at the second page and seeing what material was printed there. Thus, they may have been unaware that some of the candidates for president were listed on the opposite page.
Most people who completed the ballot knew who they wanted to vote for prior to reading the list of names. Thus, rather than attempting to read all of the answer possibilities before marking their choice, they simply looked for the name of the candidate for whom they wished to vote. The typical procedure would be to start at the top of the list and read downwards until the preferred candidate was found.
After reading the first candidate's name (Bush) on the left-hand page, people who wanted to vote for him should have been guided to the answer column by the number and an arrow. That circle was also the first (or top) circle in the answer column. It therefore seems quite unlikely that the voter would by-pass the first circle and mark the second circle, thereby voting for Buchanan, by mistake.
In contrast, people who wanted to vote for Gore, and had just seen Bush's name, would be expected to go straight down the page as they searched for Gore's name. After finding it, people are likely to have moved their fingers and thumb that held the stick-pin punching device to the appropriate punching location. It is likely that in the process of doing this some people (particularly those who are right-handed) did not see the number and arrow pointing to the appropriate answer circle because it was obscured by their hand. They may have also concluded that the second hole in the column was the correct one to punch, simply because Gore was the second candidate on the page. Thus, both the locational feature (being second) and mechanics of answering seem likely to have worked together in a way that led some people to inadvertently punch the second hole (Buchanan choice) rather than the third hole (Gore choice).
The possibility that some circles in the column of possible answers applied to Buchanan (on the next page) is unlikely to have occurred to some respondents. It is most unusual for any ballot or questionnaire to list choices to the first page to the right of the names, while choices to the second page are listed to the left of the names, and in addition to have all of them listed in a single column. Therefore, I would expect that some respondents had no idea that any of the choices in the answer column applied to the next page instead of to the candidates on page one. This problem was accentuated by the presidential preference being listed on the first page of the ballot, before the respondent had figured out, through experience, exactly how the ballot worked.
It does seem likely that some respondents who marked the second circle would have noticed that it was not aligned with the Gore box in the same way as the first circle was aligned with the Bush box. However, among those who noticed the different alignment this feature may have been discounted, because of their having to link together physically separate components (the actual paper ballot and the booklet listing candidate names) and the association of the second circle in the column with the second candidate (Gore) choice.
I would also expect that some ballots were double punched (Gore and Buchanan) as voters started to punch the second circle, realized they were making an error, and attempted to recover from it.
Despite the visual and mechanical problems that individually and jointly increase the likelihood that Gore preference voters unintentionally and unknowingly voted for Buchanan, the nature of the problem is such that it would not affect most voters. Most people are able to "figure-out" how to answer questions when they are presented in a visually inappropriate way, as was done in this situation. However, I am also confident that some Gore-preference voters would have made the error described above. At the same time, and for the reasons described above, Bush-preference voters were not likely to make the same mistake.
1Don A. Dillman is the Thomas S. Foley Distinguished Professor of Government and Public Policy at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. The opinions expressed here are his own and should not be attributed to his employer, Washington State University, or to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, for which he now serves as Vice-President and President-Elect. Background on the theory and research that lead to the interpretations reported here are published in Chapter 3 of Dillman, Don A. 2000 Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method, New York: John Wiley; and Jenkins, Cleo R. and Don A. Dillman 1997 "Towards a Theory of Self-Administered Questionnaire Design," Chapter 7 of Lyberg, Lars, et al., Survey Measurement and Process Quality, (pp.165-196,) New York: Wiley Interscience.
*************************** Don A. Dillman, Social and Economic Sciences Research Center and Departments of Sociology and Rural Sociology Washington State University Pullman, WA 99164-4014 phone: 509-335-1511 fax: 509-335-0116 e-mail: dillman at wsu.edu http://survey.sesrc.wsu.edu/dillman/ ***************************
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