The tiny journey of marking and casting a ballot

“How hard can it be to put a mark next to a candidate’s name?”

At the center of the epic voter journey is a smaller one, from receiving a ballot to casting it successfully. That journey might take days for someone voting by mail (or dropping off a vote-at-home ballot). At a vote center or a polling place, it spans a few short steps as a voter moves from the check-in station to the ballot booth where they can mark a ballot on a ballot marking device or by hand before verifying and casting it.

Within that journey is the tiniest and most important one of all: the process of marking, reviewing, and verifying selections before casting a ballot.

A well-designed voting system considers these steps in the design, helping voters be more accurate by emphasizing the aspects of voting that need attention at each stage.

First, let’s talk about a voting system in which the voter marks a ballot on a screen and then the system prints a paper ballot to be cast. The design goals shift for each step in the journey.

1. As a voter first marks the ballot, the design should emphasize voting accurately — can the voter vote the way they intend without mistakes. That includes whatever action is needed to make a selection. But it must also communicate the voting rules (like how many candidates to vote for or other instructions) and the choices of candidates, helping the voter focus on each contest, one at a time. A good system provides clear feedback so that voters can be confident that they have marked each contest accurately.
2. At the review screen of an electronic ballot marking interface, the focus shifts to a preview of all selections, emphasizing missed opportunities to vote. This extra check is key to providing a meaningful chance to make changes. Whenever we do usability testing of voting, we see people use the review screen as a double-check, sometimes finding out that they had skipped a contest or had not made all the selections they were allowed. The review screen is a chance to catch errors, whether they were made by mistake or because the voter did not understand the rules.
3. Then, the printed ballot is a confirmation that the ballot marking device followed the voter’s instructions, printing the selections as marked. Voters get a final opportunity to verify all of the contests and selections (and undervotes) before casting the ballot. The key to a successful final check here is whether the printed information is clear and easy to read. That means an understandable layout and large-enough text.

As an example, the Oregon accessible alternative ballot even uses full sentences, making it even easier to understand:

“For Mayor, you voted for Candidate Name.”
or
“For City Council, you did not make a selection.”

“Bubble-marked” ballots rely on the voter’s knowledge

Whether a voter is filling in a bubble or connecting an arrow, they have to trust their own understanding of the voting rules and their accuracy in matching a bubble to the candidate they want to vote for. They may cast their ballot with misplaced confidence that they are voting as they intend.

They don’t get much help from the voting system to check their ballots, either. Most polling place scanners will only warn about overvotes and voters whose ballots are counted at a central office get no warnings at all. Voters can leave one side of a paper ballot blank without any notification, or mark a bubble to the left of the candidate’s name (instead of the right — or vice versa) without ever realizing their mistake.

This means that the design of the ballot is critical for communicating the number of options to select and the number of pages in the ballot. Recent history (well documented in the Brennan Center’s Better Ballots) is full of examples where paper ballots have fooled voters. Ten years after the Elections Assistance Commission published best practices for paper ballots, only a few voters receive ballots with a layout that supports their journey and text that is large enough to read.

Ballot design matters for marking systems, too

Electronic ballot marking devices can help voters make selections more accurately, preventing some kinds of errors and giving warnings about others. But too many of them have ballots with the visual text designed for machines, not for the voters. They have small text, layout that makes it hard to connect candidates to contests, or they don’t work at all for voters who need magnification or other assistive tools to read the paper ballot.

The federal standard, the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) recognizes the importance of each step. The draft Principle 7 of the VVSG 2.0 says that “Ballots and vote selections are presented in a perceivable, operable, and understandable way and can be marked, verified, and cast by all voters.”

But the biggest problem is that too few ballot marking systems help voters understand exactly when their ballots are actually cast. Voters can go from step to step through the process without ever understanding exactly when and how their vote is recorded.

It doesn’t seem hard to fix this problem: all we have to do is tell voters whether and when their vote is recorded. Build the information into all the voter education that the paper ballot is not a receipt, but the official record of their choices — and the thing that they need to check the most carefully.

The ballot is just one part of the voting process

The ballot or voting system doesn’t stand by itself in ensuring voter accuracy. The physical set up of the polling place, the instructions, the actions needed to mark the ballot, and the final ballot itself all have to work together to communicate the process of voting accurately.

When voters understand the process and how to cast a ballot that reflects their intent everyone wins. Voters avoid errors that can cancel out their best attempt to vote as they intend. And when more people verify their ballot, everyone helps keep our election systems secure.